Reverse,

no problemo amigo.

Short term breakup of states unlikely. US has sufficient energy reserves, an integrated transport infrastructure and a strong military. Until the roads and rails are completely rotted and all oil and coal are used up the military will be able to have access everywhere on the continent. Therefore I think that due to the global nature of things nowadays and the likelihood of global conflict that USA will take over the whole North American military theatre will full spectrum dominance(air, sea, land) whic is exatly th opposite of devolution of powers to USA subregions.

Mid to long term(20-50 years say) PO, peak coal, road and maybe railroad disuse and the end of satellite and other communications would certainly reduce national government influence decidedly. Then of course the issues spoken of wrt air con in south and west and sub-/exurbia growth in these regions will make them unsustainable in theri present form as Kunstler so often says. Old settlement areas will return to prominence and perhaps political dominance, lost by rust belt to sun belt in the last few decades, due primarily to cheap energy for air con and exurban growth in SUVs. So a lot of these areas will be anything from wasteland to poverty traps which cannot ever be independent countries, as in your 8 regions, as they will remain poor and backward bubba redneck areas or just deserts or grazing land. Northeast and Atlantic and South East are good areas for lots of reasons due to water, etc. The south could have been a country on its own and the north. No place can exist alone completely. Take the common river routes, Mississippi river basin as most important in Eastern half of country, this would be ahsred by both north and southern regions regardless of political boundaries. The west sould become its own country for sure, say Cali and Cascadia and some inland mountain states and maybe Texas with Northern parts of Mexico and New Mexico.

Thing is as long as a big city on either coast with same language sees an advantage in stopping independence moves by other more rural areas with less wealth, then they will be able to stop such moves militarily or by trade measures. So I think USA will stay a unit as long as it is a single language area which unites the culture and has national trade routs such as the Missisippi and a transcontinental railroad (post atuomobile age). If however USA becomes splintered as a spanish speaking and English speaking areas then the Spanish pseaking area would determinedly fight guerilla warfare and it would not be seen as worth it after say ten to twenty years to keep them in.

I can see a lot of justification for this point of view, though I do not agree with it. I'll try to outline some reasons why I do not.

First of all, the mere presence of a common language and a contiguous infrastructure of railroads and a central military does not in and of itself guarantee the whole business holds together.

In Rome, they had a common written language of Latin, a well developed road system and a powerful military. Nonetheless, the Empire disintegrated. Postulates have been put forth in prior threads that this was in large part due to debasement of the currency as well as logistical problems involved in moving food from far away places to central Rome.

While certainly the infrastructure of the railroads won't rust away tomorrow, on an economic level running them becomes problematic, just as keeping shipping going in the absence of credit is problematic. Also problematic is just how you keep funding a central military with massive erosion of the tax base. The only way to do this would be the use of the military for outright theft of wealth from other nations, but heck we have most of the military mired in Iraq and they aren't exactly able to direct all the oil toward us now. Some here would contend that if we actually let the dogs loose and REALLY got tough over there, we could subdue the country and its population. Perhaps, but I suspect if we did so there would not be much left of the infrastructure for producing the oil if we did so. Nor do I think sending a task force to the Petrobras Oil fields and attempting to hijack that oil will do much good either, and eventually here the military machine fails to deliver in an economic sense, the EROEI is negative.

The problem you have here is insufficient internal wherewithal to maintain the Military Machine you depend on to maintain control over such a large area. If many of our cities suffer extreme economic hardship to the point where food deliveries become scarce or people simply cannot afford to buy the food since they are out of work, then there is simply no way the military could hold control over all those places spread over a vast region. It has to devolve into smaller regions each trying to reestablish order in some way. If the monetary system fails, the large military structure fails right behind it, in short order IMHO. Its just another domino in the Cascade Failure.

At this point, you have to look at the geographic qualities of given areas and what separates them from each other. This IMHO is far more important long term than the migration patterns, because the migration will virtually STOP here, as trade is stopping. Transportation between regions for people will be as difficult or more difficult than product distribution between regions. What separates regions geographically from each other? Oceans of course do, very bg rivers like the Mighty Mississippi do also. So also of course do Mountains. Really BIG mountains. The Great Wall that God built

Sustainability for any given region has to be looked upon wholistically, arable growing land as well as sufficient energy supplies. So the regions have to be larger than states, but smaller than the current Nation States or Empires in some cases. The break up of the Soviet Union provides a good model for this in recent history, what is apparent from that one though is that at least so far it has resulted in depopulation through most of the old states incorporated into the Soviet Union, and an overall inability of the remnants of their central military to exert and maintain control over a place like Georgia. I see no reason to believe that the fate of the American Empire and its military will be any different in the aftermath of the death of Capitalism. The MONEY simply is not there to keep such a machine running.

So I diverge from your opinion that the US holds together in even the mid to long term period of 20-50 years. A decade would be tops IMHO.

Reverse Engineer

I think your region 8 is too large. The Cascades provide a very large barrier to trade in a post oil age. Even today, there is friction between Eastern and Western Washington, with some calling for dividing the region into two states, with Western Washington and Western Oregon as one state and Eastern Washington and Oregon as another state.

Transportation along the coast would be relatively easy in a post PO world. Transportation across the cascades in the winter would be impossible, (with the exception of the Colombia river), in a post PO world.

Cliff (Start a rEVOLution, grow a garden)

I can see how a breakup would be an advantage to some regions, but a disadvantage to others. I think we can all agree that then Federal Government has become to bloated and is at risk of breaking into pieces. So then the state governments will be in charge and could group up with neighboring states for more support.

This would not necessarily result in a complete collapse of the system. It would just mean the local government would be more in charge of things. They could strip away all the Federal mandates and such and write their own policies that benefit their populace.

In Minnesota, I could totally see the advantage of creating our own region. Our advantages are being the water center and bread basket for the rest of the country. Our disadvantages are the cold winters and lack of oil. But with two thirds of the freshwater of the planet in our backyards we have some trade collateral to heat our homes for a little while longer in winter as long as its all we use it for. If we lost our access to heating supplies, I would expect massive deforestation to occur. Of course in the city in would be more like massive unstructuralism. People would burn whatever they could find in order to keep warm. Any abandoned or unused property could be teared down to provide the wood needed for fire.

The problem is I can't pinpoint when such a scenario would occur. I've been reading this forum site for the last five years and have yet to see burning buildings and chaos ensuing outside my windowpanes. Even as I read about all the financial tidal waves and all the other depressing crap happening to my friends and loved ones it still seems completely unreal. I still walk to school in the morning and see Mrs. Adelman walking her puppies as if life has always been the same and always will.

On a more positive not, people seem to be more generally aware that the dilemma were facing is a permanent one. There will be sacrifices and a decline to their living habits. Although I don't here many people discussing the deterioration of the United States and North America, I have myself introduced the concept to people and opened up some interesting discussions.

The large size of R8 is purely for selfish reasons

There is about no way AK can produce enough food even for the currently small population, so on a trade level we have to be connected to growing regions to trade the oil and NG still extant up here. I added the Canadian provinces to make this contiguous as a land mass, but really I think its a straight trade back and forth by container ships and tankers between AK and WA.

The Hosers in Western Canada are probably the 9th Region.

Reverse Engineer

It's a fun game, but if you're getting rid of the east-west ties of national governments, well, Manitoba has definitely got a lot more in common with places like Saskatchewan and Montana than it does with Ontario and Michigan. Honestly, I don't think you can cut things up as neatly as that. New York, for instance, has its Mid-Atlantic, New England, and Midwestern aspects. Ohio, Pennsylvania, Quebec, and Ontario are also places I know that are artificially intra-associated. The lines are arbitrary, but in a situation you're talking about, people would probably have to forget about that kind of thing and gravitate towards other people like themselves.

Alternatively, the whole place might wind up under some sort of overarching confederate agreement that would leave the national and constitutional niceties in place for show, but in practice would effectively call the shots. Frankly, I think that's a more likely (or at least more immediate) outcome in this day and age than collapse, disassociation, and decay.