Is the Deadly Crash of Our Civilization Inevitable?

An interview with author Thomas Homer-Dixon about the social, political, economic and technological crises we face and how long we can sustain the lifestyle that brought them about.

…Once you’ve passed peak production in a field or a region, the decline can be quite rapid. The major oil field in Oman and a lot of the fields in Texas are declining at 12 percent a year. The North Sea field that the U.K. depends upon is declining 8 percent a year. That’s a very rapid shift from increasing production to decreasing production — a shift into a world of scarcity. When we pass the peak in global oil production, energy prices will rise dramatically and very quickly.

…Here’s a statistic that I came across in writing this book that really astonished me. We’ve quadrupled the human population in the last century, from 1.5 billion to 6.3 billion, in part because we’ve had a lot of cheap energy. In particular, that cheap energy has allowed us to increase the amount of energy in our food production systems by 80 fold.

So it takes 80 times more energy to feed four times more people.

Exactly. We’ve created a food system, a water system, and cities that are fundamentally dependent upon a resource that is not indefinitely available.

AlterNet