Would Countries Collapse After Oil Vanishes?

Friedrichs predicts that “increasing conflict over scarce energy would undermine the very foundations of the world-wide social, economic and political normalization processes” of the past few centuries.

He looks at how the possibility of resource shortages helped shape Japan’s imperialist strategy following WWI and how the disruption of subsidized oil from the Soviet Union in North Korea after the Cold War resulted in the elite living on as usual as hundreds of thousands died from hunger. Similarly, in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union stopped subsidized energy shipments to Cuba, Fidel Castro was forced to call a national emergency that devastated the national economy as factories lay idle, public transportation crumbled and unpredictable electrical outages gripped the island.

Unlike the famine that wiped out nearly 5 percent of the North Korean population, though, the Cuban people found a way to muddle through thanks to tourism, good weather and subsistence farming.

In other words, he argues, some countries might react to peak oil with predatory militarism like Japan (he predicts the U.S. and China are most likely to follow this path, along with less militarily robust countries like India or Israel), some might fall back on totalitarian retrenchment like North Korean and others may adapt like Cuba thanks to a strong community ethos. A recent New York Times article noted that some Americans are already prepping for the coming of peak oil by hoarding food and supplies in case things do go haywire.

Friedrichs also predicts that large oil companies like Exxon and Shell would lose ground to state-controlled companies, alternative energies like solar and wind could rise up to meet demand and rather than peak oil causing an immediate collapse, we should expect a painful adaptation process that could last a century or more.

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