The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [114]
Convergence: The Timeline
If all we had to do was face any one of the predicaments outlined above, I’m confident that we would collectively do our best, respond intelligently, accommodate the outcome, and carry on. But if we allow for the possibility of facing several of these predicaments at once, the concern mounts considerably. A timeline stretching from 2010 to 2020 reveals a truly massive set of challenges converging on an exceptionally short timeframe (see Figure 23.1).
Figure 23.1 The Twenty-Teens
Image: Jeanine Dargis
Placed on a timeline, we see that a bursting housing bubble began in 2008, just one year before the first wave of boomers entered retirement in the United States (January 1, 2009). Somewhere along the way, let’s call it 2015, Peak Oil and rising demand will conspire to outpace oil supplies, forcing an enormously expensive adjustment for every economy currently dependent on cheap oil. Soon thereafter, other depleted resources will peak, as their energy costs of extraction and refining will finally outweigh their economic utility. Unpredictable costs associated with a shifting climate are another potential demand on our limited budgets. And further limiting our options, a failure to save and invest, along with historically unprecedented levels of debt, will cast a shadow over the possible solutions or responses we might envision to all of the other predicaments.
The primary question is, Where will the money come from to dedicate to each of these challenges if our savings are depleted and our debt levels are already in uncharted territory? This one question encompasses a whole host of others:
Where will the tens, if not hundreds, of trillions come from to make up the shortfalls in pensions and the entitlement programs?
How many trillions will be required to reshape our transportation infrastructure to cope with the reality of Peak Oil?
Where will the money come from to clean up the aftermath of the bursting housing and credit bubbles?
How much more expensive will food and minerals be in the future, when many more people are placing higher demands on increasingly marginal resources?
How will we cope with any of these extraordinarily expensive challenges while burdened with the highest debt loads and lowest savings levels ever seen?
Any one of these events will prove to be a difficult strain on our national economy, but what happens if two of them arrive simultaneously? What about three? It’s not hard to appreciate that potentially enormous risks lie along this timeline.
Each of these key trends or threats will take years, if not decades, of careful planning and adjustment to mitigate. And yet we find them all parked smack in front of us, without any serious national discussions or planning, as if they weren’t even there. With every passing day, we squander precious time while the problems grow larger and more costly to remedy, if not becoming thoroughly intractable. The mark of a mature adult is someone who can manage complexity and plan ahead. In my opinion, with few exceptions, the current political and corporate leadership of this country is neither managing nor planning well. That needs to change, and soon. It’s time to return to the habit of living within our natural and economic means. We need to set priorities, set a budget, and stick to both.
This Time Is Different
I can hear the critics now: Doomsayers have been predicting the end of the world since the beginning of time, and the doom has never happened. Or perhaps, What’s the difference between the story that you have laid out and the one that Thomas Malthus expounded upon back in the late 1700s?1 For starters, we have access to a lot more data than Malthus could ever dream of. Where he had access to a limited number of physical books to refer to, we can happily web-surf