Don't fall for the shale boom hype

Chris Martenson: I'd rate these threats in the horizons. My most immediate concern, personally, is that our world financial system could crumble with the slightest provocation right now, with pretty disruptive effects. It's not yet out of the woods by any stretch.

On a longer horizon, humans are living well beyond our ecological and energy budgets, and we're eating into our principal on both accounts. Either we adjust on our own terms, or it will happen eventually on some other terms.

These are actually linked threats. At the root of it all we have a monetary system that enforces perpetual growth without which it wobbles and constantly threatens to utterly collapse. So even as our financial system is wobbling right now, sooner or later we have to come up with a system that can operate perfectly well within limits.

James Stafford: You talk about the world financial system crumbling. How would this look and how do you see this playing out?

Chris Martenson: So at heart what we have is a debt-based money system that requires exponential growth, just to not fall completely apart on a yearly basis. And that's something that I can't see working in a post-peak world.

We grow our use of mineral resources about 2% per year. Which means that every 30 years, roughly speaking, we're going to be doubling the amount of those resources that we're pulling out of the ground and putting into the world economy. Obviously you cannot constantly double your extraction of finite resources. This means we're going to need a new money system at some point, and fortunately, they exist.

People really need to be concerned about this right now. And our current crop of leadership on both the monetary side and on the Fed and the fiscal side in Washington, D.C., have made it abundantly clear that they're going to preserve the status quo as long as possible, and at any cost.

And so the risk contained in that observation is that we're going to chug along until something forces us to change. And at this point I think that it will be a complete meltdown in the financial markets. And the possibility, then, of a dollar crisis that ends in either the complete destruction of the dollar as a useful form of money or something pretty close to that. I'm not saying that it will happen, but I am saying that the risks of that outcome are now increasing.

Fortunately, there are things that we can do to increase our personal and community resilience that are easy, fun, fulfilling, and great investments to boot. So, we still have a lot of control on this story.

James Stafford: The crash course paint's a pretty bleak picture for our future. Are you optimistic about any technologies that can help us out of our various predicaments?

Chris Martenson: We don't need any new technologies, we have everything we need right here on the shelf now to begin living a very different life. It begins with, I believe, the most fundamentally important thing we can do, conservation, at this stage.

If you look at a nighttime satellite photo, you can see that there are probably a few lights we could turn off and save a bit of electricity. There's technology on the shelf right now enabling homes, either residential or commercial buildings, to be built that use a fraction of the energy they currently use, just by tilting them south and putting windows on the right side and ventilating them. Very simple things like that that can be done. All we have to do is decide that we're going to use them, and that's missing still.