Russian attack on Ukraine - 24 [9] If higher energy prices ca | Peak oil blog

Russian attack on Ukraine - 24

[9] If higher energy prices cannot be achieved, there is a significant chance that the change in the world order will be in the direction of pushing the world economy toward collapse.
We are living in a world today with shrinking energy resources per capita. We should be aware that we are reaching the limits of fossil fuels and other minerals that we can extract, unless we can somehow figure out a way to get the economy to tolerate higher prices.

The danger that we are approaching is that the top levels of governments, everywhere in the world, will either collapse or be overthrown by their unhappy citizens. The reduced amounts of energy available will push governments in this way. At the same time, programs such as government-funded pension plans and unemployment plans will disappear. Electricity is likely to become intermittent and then fail completely. International trade will shrink back; economies will become much more local.

We were warned that we would be reaching a time period with serious energy problems about now. The first time came in the 1957 Rickover speech discussed in Section 7. The second warning came from the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows and others, which documented a computer modeling approach to the problem of limits of a finite world. The Ukraine invasion may be a push in the direction of more serious energy problems, emerging primarily from the fact that other countries will want to punish Russia. Few people will realize that punishing Russia is a dangerous path; a serious concern is that today’s economy cannot continue in its current form without Russia’s fossil fuel exports.