It isn’t gridcrash that makes the lights go out

There’s been some interesting discussion since the revision of the Olduvai Hypothesis about gridcrash and blackouts as a likely indicator of infrastructure crisis. Personally, I don’t really have a strong opinion about whether the grid as a single entity will live or die.

…But what I do have a strong opinion on (you knew there had to be something ;-), is this: I think most of us ought to be preparing for a life without electricity, regardless of whether we believe that peak oil may cause disruptions in the electrical grid.


I believe this for purely practical reasons. Peak oil, for most of us, will be less about geopolitics and large scale infrastructure crisis than it will be about what I call (riffing on Freud) ordinary human poverty. That is, we’re going to be poorer, many of us much, much poorer. Even economists who dismiss peak oil acknowledge that significant oil shocks of any kind – caused either by depletion or by political crisis, would cause a major economic crisis. The things that many of us (by no means all) have been able to be certain of – a certain kind of stability and comfort, are going to go away. The economic problems created by oil and gas depletion are likely to create a serious, and deep economic crisis, much more serious than anything we’ve seen in my lifetime.

During the last depression, 29% of American schoolchildren suffered some form of malnutrition. Herbert Hoover famously said, “at least no one has starved” only to be caught out as cases of starvation appeared around the nation and mothers in cities rioted because they had nothing for their children to eat. The classic image of stockbrokers selling apples on the street and bread lines going around the block doesn’t even quite convey how desperately poor many people were. It is not unlikely this view of our past is part of our future.

Energy Bulletin