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Sharon Astyk’s 2009 Predictions
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
Its Hour Come Round At Last
… Here are my predictions for 2008 and my comments on how they came out: [Sharon got about 9 out of 10 right].
… what about the coming year? While I think 2008 was when most people first realized something was wrong, I’m going to go out on a limb here (ok, not a huge limb, but a limb) and say that 2009 will be the year we say that things “collapsed.”
… I mean that the US is likely to undergo a financial collapse a la the Great Depression – widespread unemployment, lots of people facing hunger, cold and the inability to get health care, a disruption of what we tend to assume are birthright services, and a sense that the system doesn’t work anymore. I don’t claim that we are headed by Thursday to cannibalism, however – what I think will be true is that we will often do surprisingly well in the state of collapse, as hard as it is.
… 1. Some measure of normalcy will hold out until late spring or early summer, mostly based on hopes for the Obama Presidency. But by late summer 2009, the aggregate loss of jobs, credit and wealth will cause an economic crisis that makes our current situation look pretty mild. With predictions of up to a million jobs lost each month, there will simply come a point at which the economy as we understand it now cannot function – we will see the modern equivalents of breadlines and stockbrokers selling apples on the streets.
2. Many plans for infrastructure investments currently being proposed will never be completed, and many may never be started, because the US may be unable to borrow the money to fund them. … The most successful projects will be small, localized programs that distribute resources as widely as possible.
… 3. 2009 will be the year that most of the most passionate climate activists (and I don’t exclude myself) have to admit that there is simply not a snowball’s chance in hell (and hell is getting toastier quickly) that we are going to prevent a 2C+ warming of the planet. We are simply too little, too late.
… 4. 2008 will probably be the world’s global oil peak, but we won’t know this for a while. When we do realize it, it will be anticlimactic, because we’ll be mired in the consequences of our economic, energy and climate crisis.
… 5. Decreased access to goods, services and food will be a reality this year. Some of this will be due to stores going out of business – we may all have to travel further to meet needs. Some will be due to suppliers going under, following the wave of merchant bankruptcies. Some may be due to disruptions in shipping and transport of supplies.
… 6. Most Americans will see radical cut backs in local services and safety nets. Funding will simply dry up for many state and local programs.
… 7. Nations will overwhelmingly fail to pony up promised commitments to the world’s poor, and worldwide, the people who did the least harm to the environment will die increasingly rapidly of starvation. This will not be inevitable, but people in the rich world will claim it is.
… 8. We will finally attempt to deal with foreclosures, but the falling value of housing will make it a losing proposition.
… 9. By the end of the year, whether or not we will collapse or have collapsed will continue to be hotly debated by everyone who can still afford their internet service. No one will agree on what the definition of collapse actually is, plenty of people will simply be living their old lives, only with a bit less, while others will be having truly apocalyptic and deeply tragic losses.
… 10. Despite how awful this is, the reality is that not everything will fall apart.
(15 December 2008)
Sharon’s had a good record with her predictions and I think I’d go along with most of them. Two quibbles though.
We need to be very careful about throwing around the term “collapse.” Recessions and depressions are not collapse. Real collapse means a breakdown in government and economic systems – it means warlords and barbarism. Dmitry Orlov wrote a great piece on The five stages of collapse.
Sharon, along with most observers, minimizes the political change that will accompany the coming hard times. The Thirties are a texbook example of how politics shifts during a sustained depression. For a modern day example, consider the events in Greece. -BA
Kunstler: Change You Won’t Believe
James Howard Kunstler, blog
The peak oil story has not been nullified by the scramble to unload every asset for cash — including whomping gobs of oil contracts — during this desperate season of bank liquidation. The main implication of the peak oil story is that we won’t be able to generate the kind of economic growth that defined our way of life for decades because the primary energy resources needed for it will be contracting.
… We have to, so to speak, get to place mentally where we can face the kinds of change that are now necessary and unavoidable. We’re not there yet. It’s not clear whether the elected new national leadership knows just how severe the required changes will really be. Surely the public would be shocked to grasp what’s in store. Probably the worst thing we can do now would be to mount a campaign to stay where we are, lost in raptures of happy motoring and blue-light-special shopping.
The economy we’re evolving into will be un-global, necessarily local and regional, and austere. It won’t support even our current population. This being the case, the political fallout is also liable to be severe. For one thing, we’ll have to put aside our sentimental fantasies about immigration. This is almost impossible to imagine, since that narrative is especially potent among the Democratic Party members who are coming in to run things. A tough immigration policy is exactly the kind of difficult change we have to face. This is no longer the 19th century. The narrative has to change.
The new narrative has to be about a managed contraction — and by “managed” I mean a way that does not produce civil violence, starvation, and public health disasters.
… A key concept of the economy to come is that size matters — everything organized at the giant scale will suffer dysfunction and failure. Giant companies, giant governments, giant institutions will all get into trouble. This, unfortunately, doesn’t bode so well for the Obama team and it is salient reason why they must not mount a campaign to keep things the way they are and support enterprises that have to be let go, including many of the government’s own operations. The best thing Mr. Obama can do is act as a wise counselor companion-in-chief to a people who now have to leave a lot behind in order to move forward into a plausible future. He seems well-suited to this task in sensibility and intelligence. The task will surely include a degree of pretense that he is holding some familiar things together and propping up some touchstones of the comfortable life. But the truth is we are all going to the same unfamiliar new territory.
… The economy we’re moving into will have to be one of real work, producing real things of value, at a scale consistent with energy resource reality. I’m convinced that farming will come much closer to the center of economic life, as the death of petro-agribusiness makes food production a matter of life and death in America — as opposed to the disaster of metabolic entertainment it is now. Reorganizing the landscape itself for this finer-scaled new type of farming is a task fraught with political peril (land ownership questions being historically one of the main reasons that societies fall into revolution). The public is completely unprepared for this kind of change.
(15 December 2008)
Tom Friedman discusses foreign policy, green, and other ‘stachey matters (video)
Charlie Rose show
(15 December 2008)
Energy policy and world events through a US-centric prism. With Friedman, one gets a feeling for what people are thinking (or will think) in America. Some of his phrases make me think that he has been listening in on the peak oil blogosphere. (Please note that posting an item on EB does not mean that we agree with everything the writer has ever said!) -BA
David Roberts writes at Gristmill:
Charlie Rose is doing a series of year-end conversations with thinkers of note. He started on Thursday with our old friend Tom Friedman.
