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WinnersBeyond Peak Scenario Contest |
Things Might Get Better
By William Press Miller
July 4, 2076
As I look back over my long life, I can just remember the year 2005 when the first manifestations of Peak Oil hit the public consciousness. Back then I had all sorts of electronic toys and games. Dad drove a big SUV; we took air flights to Wyoming and Utah to ski. No one thought much about the availability of gasoline, electricity, or any kind of energy. But over the next five years everything changed. The Iranian War, the Financial Panic of 2008, the collapse of the electrical grid during the winter of 2009-10 -to my historian's mind the rapid pace of those calamities rivaled what the Romans faced in the early 400's when the barbarians swarmed across the Rhine and began the destruction of classical civilization in the West.
Of course, most of our disasters were of our own creation. The politicians in America only made matters worse with price controls, foolish regulations, and that election dominated two-year planning horizon that was totally inadequate for dealing with the terrible problems the country faced. Somehow my family survived the disintegration and chaos of the next 40 years. We mourned the loss of so many things we had taken for granted in the first decade of the twenty first century. All professional sports collapsed, led appropriately by NASCAR. The last professional baseball game (a day game of course) was the in spring of 2019. All the TV networks and cable companies had failed due to the chronic problems keeping the grid up. Professional sports couldn't survive. Our computers died one by one as parts availability and power outages degraded them. The global internet shriveled up and vanished by the late 20's even for government and military users. Most people were without reliable electrical power well before that. We missed the luxury of having our own transportation the most. Mom's Volvo made it to 2012 but then lack of parts and sky high gasoline (if you could find it) made us switch to bicycles. Dad thought it was ironic that we became car-less on the 100th anniversary of the Titanic. We had no way to tow our boat to the lake after that! The period up to 2050 was crisis and hardship year after year. Eventually Americans began hearing less about the outside world. The pandemics that swept the old U.S. in the 30's and 40's wreaked even greater damage in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Some think billions died. But then life started to get better.
Here are some of the good things about today. Life is slower. We rise and retire with the Sun. Life has a Jeffersonian simplicity. We all raise a good portion of our own food. We know our neighbors well. Our kids and grandkids live close by within easy biking distance. We've become the yeoman ideal that Jefferson thought was so important for a thriving republic. We have a strong sense of community and little use for government on any level. We have honest money now--gold and silver. No one would consider accepting paper money ever again after the financial debacle earlier this century. That has severely restricted the ability of government to do anything the people won't pay for immediately through tax increases. Most people now pride themselves on their self-sufficiency. The welfare state is long gone. The needy poor get local help, but not the lazy or the immoral. Few of the latter remain anyway. People take care of their own elderly and voluntary charities assist those who have no family. There is no military-industrial complex. Without deficit financing there was no way the central government could maintain a welfare state or an international military presence. Most of the navy's ships were broken up for their highly valuable scrap content, likewise the army's tanks and artillery. Experts believe the last nuclear weapons (probably Brazil's) degraded to the point of total ineffectiveness sometime in the 60's. So the specter of nuclear war has finally been banished. Wars still occur, of course, but they're on a 19th century level. The terrorism of the early 21st century ebbed away as people everywhere focused on pure survival. The Middle East nuclear war eliminated many of the underlying causes anyway. With aircraft a luxury of the mega rich, most countries with armed forces only had ultra lights for reconnaissance. Long range bombers and supersonic fighters are just seen in museums now. My grand children scarcely believe me when I tell them I used to FLY on vacation. I sometimes do miss seeing the glint of light off a passenger jet high in the sky.
Global trade is a tiny fraction of what it was when I was a boy. More people now are involved in the transportation industry, however, as the world requires a lot more vessels to move even that smaller volume of goods. Sailing ships carry all cargo nowadays. They can't compare to the storage capacity giant container ships had when I was young. There are busy ports all up and down the former U.S. coastline. It takes a lot of people to man, maintain, and service the intercoastal and transocean trade. Costs of transportation are a much higher percentage of a good's retail cost than in the old days. So most international trade is in luxury goods. Nobody talks about "globalization" or "out sourcing" anymore. Most areas of the world are locally self-sufficient in the necessities of life. Those that could not be (the Arabian peninsula, Japan, parts of Africa) simply suffered enormous die off until balance was restored.
Steam locomotives transport most goods within the country. A huge infrastructure had to be rebuilt over the decades. Probably 5% of the working population works for the railroads, comparable to the level in 1899. A lot of skilled mechanical jobs were created which enabled people to transition from the pre-Peak Oil service economy. Passenger travel returned as well which also meant jobs for porters, cooks, conductors and so on. Some towns even brought back electrical trolley cars after their local grid was restored.
I think people are much healthier today-both physically and emotionally. We eat locally grown organic food (the only kind!) and the occasional exotic food, such as oranges or pineapples. Coffee is a rare luxury. Soft drinks and "junk food" are only a distant youthful memory. We get plenty of exercise in our daily work since most of us are farmers, tradesmen, ranchers, lumbermen, or laborers of one sort or another. Most of us also participate in community activities such as dance clubs, softball teams, soccer, and the like. Many of us also enjoy being in the local theatre or church choir. Like our great-great-great grandparents in the 19th century we rarely travel very far. My village has access to a railroad, but many communities do not. The continent is probably less "railed" than it was in 1900. Whole regions of the barren Southwest have no rail service at all. Not that Phoenix with its 20,000 population could justify any railroad. Local character is flourishing. Outsiders are easy to distinguish by their accents. There's even been some regionalization of fashion. Beer has definitely become regional, and that's good!
Life is better also in the sense that it is more egalitarian. The vast gulf between Wall Street and Main Street has narrowed considerably. Financial engineering has given way to mechanical engineering. The men who can keep the steam engines going or who know how to coax more work out of existing machines are much more respected than ever before. If you can work with your hands, it doesn't matter if your IQ is only 100. Unlike in my father's day, no one makes millions because his stock options have gone up or because he leveraged Other People's Money into a speculative fortune. There are no global financial markets anymore. We have true free enterprise without the distortions caused by fiat currency, credit-driven banking, and financial excess. Taxes are light because we don't expect the government to do much for us. Government at all levels was widely discredited after the enormous governmental failures during the first half of this century. Government leaders now have a sense of stewardship regarding the people's money, probably because that's the only way to get elected.
I do miss the "old USA" sometimes. It was big and powerful and for a few brief decades it dominated the world stage. But "The Collapse" changed all that de facto and the Second Constitutional Convention of 2051 changed it de jure. We now have more of a Swiss Confederation style of government. (People noticed that the Swiss managed to survive the years of chaos reasonably well). Today, most people identify more closely with their state or city than with the national government, weak as it is. Yet I remember the old government's NASA and the dreams of returning to the moon or going to Mars. None of that will ever happen now. Humanity is doomed to Earth, and that is sad in a cosmological sense.
Again, I think we're back to a more Jeffersonian political environment of limited government and almost unlimited personal freedom. There are no public schools-parents send their kids to private tutors or to small private schools. That alone eliminated a lot of social strife. College is not nearly the rite of passage it was in my day. Most of the state universities closed for fiscal reasons back in the 30's and with them the taxpayer subsidized education of the masses. Now only those truly in love with learning go on to higher education. We no longer "park" young adults for four years. Most prefer to get out in the workplace. The universities and the kids are better off for the return of elitism to academia.
We have volunteer fire squads throughout the county. Policing is by neighborhood action groups. Medical care is not as technological as it once was. Undoubtedly some people die who could have been kept alive in my youth. But the system works much better for the majority of people. The AMA no longer restricts the supply of doctors, so per capita we have more in 2076 than we had in 2005. Also all the anticompetitive regulations on midwives, nurse practitioners, acupuncturists and so on were swept away in the revulsion to government/special interest group corruption. On the other hand, I can't remember the last drug breakthrough. The demise of Wall Street has made it extremely difficult to fund innovative start up companies, and biotech and pharmaceutical companies have been especially hard hit. The drugs that have proven effectiveness are still with us, and best of all they are all generic. So all in all the cost of medical care has become more accessible to most people.
As the country observes (few will celebrate) the Tri-Centennial, I think life has improved since my youth. There were some horrible decades of transition and turmoil, but that is behind us. We have adapted to a Nineteenth century lifestyle and it's not so bad at all. Consumerism is out and community is in. The world is in better balance now-ecologically, politically, and economically. Western civilization has survived. There is peace in the land. Life is good again.
