Reversing globalization

Soaring oil costs will localize economies, expand transit jobs – and green earth

If Jeff Rubin had a sprawling house in the suburbs, he’d sell it and move downtown.

The author of Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller thinks the day is not far off when soaring oil prices will mean subdivisions in suburbia will be plowed under for farm fields and the average Canadian won’t be able to afford to drive a car.

Globalization will be reversed, he says, with economies becoming much smaller and more local. No more cheap televisions from Korea, no more California strawberries.

No more steel from China.

It will become far too expensive to ship products around the globe.

Instead, manufacturing jobs will return to developed countries, he says, and products will be made to serve local markets.

“All of a sudden, the globalizing forces of the last three decades will come to a screeching halt. While trade liberalization and technical change have flattened the world, the soaring prices for energy are going to make the world rounder again,” Rubin writes in his easily readable bestseller.

Hamilton Spectator