Still Pretending

Jim Kunstler writes that Americans are Still Pretending that they live in the greatest nation in the world:

Once the US gets into serious difficulties with our oil supplies. every other sector of the economy wobbles, including especially the food-growing sector, which cannot function without copious amounts of diesel fuel and hydrocarbon-based soil 'inputs.' Americans will go hungry, and not just the 'underclasses.'

Along in this process somewhere, there is huge potential for armed conflict with other nations. If the unraveling gets traction while George W. Bush remains in charge, the US may answer bellicosity from oil-exporting nations, or energy-hungry rivals, with truculence of our own. Things can get out of control very fast in such a situation. Nations that were happily selling us salad shooters six months earlier may be targeting our naval vessels with a different sort of shooter, say a Sunburn missile. In any case, we will be acting with a bankrupt, exhausted, and over-extended military, and the best case outcome would leave us merely isolated and marooned geopolitically on our own continent, with dwindling energy and mineral resources and an angry, demoralized population.

This time around we have more to fear than fear itself. The banking executives, government officials, and candidates for president are not doing the nation a service by concealing and ignoring our losses. Finance, as the driver of an economy, is finished, but the deployment of capital is still an indispensable arm of a real economy. Sooner or later we'll get back to money that stands for something and banks that function as credible repositories of wealth. But we haven't even started down the path to that place, and the longer we pretend that we don't have to go there, the worse the journey will be.

Emphasis Mine

Jim Kunstler has consistently pointed out that the USA is in no position to absorb the effects of peak oil. The policies pursued by the US government have only exacerbated the problem of running an economy on less oil.

I think the appearance of hunger among the US middle class would lead to an emigration of talent (mainly liberals) to other countries, and a growth in the radical right.

Would Fascism grow out of a US depression? The signs are there in the proto-Fascist movements that already exist. With the emigration of liberals, the politics would drift further to the right.

The world could face the prospect of a nuclear armed Fascist power with a very big chip on its shoulder. Interesting times indeed!