I teach my kids to prepare for the Hard Day. No one knows exactly what form the Hard Day will take, but it seems certain that we, as a nation, maybe even as a species, will face a difficult period of privation and hardship within the next five years. We call this the Hard Day. Two conditions in particular are coming together to form the perfect Hard Day storm: the seemingly endless plunge of the dollar precipitated by profligate spending of an undisciplined Congress and a White House consumed with sanctimonious megalomania waging an endless war of imperial hubris in the Middle East; and the imminent oil shortage.
James Howard Kunstler wrote an excellent summary of the oil crisis we face. I’ve included an excerpt below, but you should read the full article.
Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.
We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this predicament. President George W. Bush has been briefed on the dangers of the oil-peak situation as long ago as before the 2000 election and repeatedly since then. In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real and states plainly that “the world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary.”
