Your oil wake up call…(file under ignore)

• In several countries oil production has peaked, and energy return on oil production is falling. Thus their oil export income is being reduced.
• In recent decades populations have exploded, due primarily to decades of abundant income from oil exports. The 1960 – 2014 multiples for Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Nigeria, Egypt, India and China have been 5.5, 4.6, 5.3, 4.2, 3.4, 3.0 and 2.1 respectively.
• There has been accelerating deterioration in land, water and food resources. If water use per capita is under 1,700 m³ p.a. there is water stress. The amounts for the above countries, (…and the % fall since 1960), are Yemen, 86 m³ (71% fall), Saudi Arabia 98 m³ (82% fall), Iraq 998 m³ (88% fall), Nigeria 1,245 m³ (73% fall), Egypt 20 m³ (70% fall). Climate change will make these numbers worse.
• So, more and more of the falling oil income now has to go into importing food.
• Increasing amounts of oil are having to go into other domestic uses, reducing the amounts available for export to the big oil consuming countries.
• In many of the big exporting countries these trends are likely to more or less eliminate oil exports in a decade or so, including Saudi Arabia.
• These mostly desert countries have nothing else to earn export income from except sand.
• Falling oil income means that governments can provide less for their people, so they have to cut subsidies and raise food and energy prices.
• These conditions are producing increasing discontent with government, civil unrest, and conflict between tribes over scarce water and land. Religious and sectarian conflicts are fuelled. Unemployed, desperate and hungry farmers and youth have little option but to join extremist groups such as ISIS where at least they are fed. Our media ignore the bio-physical conditions generating conflicts, refugee and oppression by regimes, giving the impression that the troubles are only due to religious fanatics.
• The IMF makes the situation worse. Failing states appeal for economic assistance and are confronted with the standard recipe; increased loans on top of already impossible debt, given on condition that they gear their economies to paying the loans back plus interest, imposing "austerity", privatizing and selling off assets.
• Local elite authoritarianism and corruption make things worse. Rulers need to crack down on disruption and to force the belt tightening through. The rich will not allow their privileges to be reduced in order to support reallocation of resources to mass need. The dominant capitalist ideology weighs against "interfering with market forces", i.e., with the freedom for the rich to "develop" what is most profitable to themselves.
• Thus there is a vicious positive feedback downward spiral, to which it would seem there can be no escape, because it is basically due to the oil running out in a context of too many people and too few land and water resources.
• There will at least be major knock on effects on the global economy and the rich (oil-consuming) countries, probably within a decade. It is quite likely that the global economy will collapse as the capacity to import oil will be greatly reduced. When the fragility of the global financial system is added (… remember, debt now 6 times GDP), instantaneous chaotic breakdown is very likely.
• Nothing can be done about this situation. It is the result of ignoring fifty years of warnings about the limits to growth.

So the noose tightens, around the brainless taken for granted ideology that drives consumer-capitalist society and that cannot be even thought about, let alone dealt with. We are far beyond the levels of production and consumption that can be sustained or that all people could ever rise to. We haven't noticed because the grossly unjust global economy delivers most of the world's dwindling resource wealth to the few who live in rich countries. Well the party is now getting close to being over. You don't much like this message …well have a go at proving that it's mistaken. Nar, better to just ignore as before.

If the foregoing account is more or less right, then there is only one conceivable way out. That is to face up to transition to lifestyles and systems that enable a good quality of life for all on extremely low per capita resource use rates, with no interest in getting richer or pursuing economic growth. There is no other way to defuse the problems now threatening to eliminate us, the resource depletion, the ecological destruction, the deprivation of several billion in the Third World, the resource wars and the deterioration in our quality of life. Such a "Simpler Way" is easily designed, and built…if that's what you want to do. (See thesimplerway.info/) Many in Voluntary Simplicity, Eco-village and Transition Towns movements have moved a long way towards it. Your chances of getting through to it are very poor, but the only sensible option is to join these movements.

Is the mainstream working on the problem, is the mainstream worried about the problem, does the mainstream even recognize the problem … I checked the Sydney Daily Telegraph yesterday; 20% of the space was given to sport.