[jl6]

Fossil fuels are going, and big changes to the economy are coming. That part is certainly correct. Predicting doom, collapse, and chaos doesn’t necessarily follow, and there’s a schadenfreude risk that you might fall into some cognitive traps, like wanting the apocalypse to come so that you can tell everyone you were right, or so you can finally make use of all that tinned food and ammo you hoarded.

You’ll get better expected returns from working to avert disaster than panicking about it.

[wilburTheDog]

I think those of us who try to anticipate problems and prepare for them are often easily dismissed and or ridiculed. It's true nobody really needed their cold-war bomb shelters, and the TV shows about people doing bug-out drills to their fortified heavily armed wilderness compounds paint a picture that's hard to relate to. But the two problems I'm concerned about right now are way bigger than me. No matter how hard I try to avert disaster, we are going to continue to see increasing effects of climate change and oil supply depletions. It's hard to predict exactly when, but I expect either or both to be quite significant in my lifetime, and I'm not a child. As such I am trying to arrange my life so that said effects do not constitute a disaster for me. And if I'm completely wrong, and GE develops a clean Mr. Fusion reactor next week, and the Gates foundation figures out an easy way to remove 2-3 trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, well then I'll enjoy my gardens and my hobbies and never think of it again. But just because I'm preparing for problems in the future doesn't mean I want them to happen. Don't worry about that.

[FooHentai]

It's interesting how a comment can be so differently interpreted depending on what you extrapolate from the term 'collapse'. It might conjur up preppers spouting about TEOTWAWKI, WROL, and SHTF as they lock down in their bunkers waiting for the bombs to drop. On that basis I understand your response.

But there is also much discussion on peak oil and climate change that apply 'collapse' differently, as shorthand for a simplifying of the economy and civilisation as a result of no longer having the cheap abundant energy needed to sustain the level of complexity which it has grown into during the age of fossil fuel extraction.

If (and it's a big if) you anticipate the fossil fuel boom ending without the advent of an equal or greater replacement energy source, collapse by the latter definition is a useful term to discuss what that might look like. It's certainly true that we have extensive supply chains, dense living, abstraction from the fundamentals of survival, and many aspects of our current way of living exclusively dependent on fossil fuel and petrochemicals. So it follow that without equivalent or better energy source to sustain those things there must come about, either by choice or circumstance, a simplification (or collapse) of many aspects of present-day civilisation.