Reply #36: The ability to do all that nasty stuff depends on cheap oil and natural gas...

[hunter]

Without cheap oil and natural gas you can't economically build and fuel the tools required to extract oil from tar sands. It's the easily extracted oil and natural gas that make very capital intensive projects such as tar sands extraction and deep sea oil platforms possible.

In other words, we won't have a choice. Nobody is going to buy cars if they can't afford fuel, and nobody is going to be able to afford the fuel because the entire economy will be running out of inexpensive fuel while real incomes decline. If we manage to keep our heads together much of the U.S. "lunch crowd" may end up working for some modern version of the Depression era WPA, regularly riding worker buses towing porta-potties, and thanking God they aren't starving like so many other people in the world.

That's not exactly a utopia.

Within a decade I suspect the U.S. will be unable to support its oil-fueled military empire simply because oil is too expensive, and especially too expensive to take by force. If a barrel of peacefully acquired oil costs $200, a barrel produced in someplace like Iraq will cost $400, not counting the blood cost. There will be a slow rotting away of U.S. infrastructure and this will make our military as it is now structured nonviable.

It doesn't make any sense to believe things can go on as they always have once the easily extracted oil and natural gas are gone.