[whatpeak]

According to Slate's survey, Peak Oil was voted as a possible scenario picked by 9 percent of user of Pick Your Own Apocalypse feature.

How is America going to end?


I guess some members of this board were busy.

[socrates1fan]

Being raised in the midwest, it makes it hard for me to believe that peak oil will be the end of America.
At least in my region people will find ways to deal with such issues.
We have more than enough fresh water, good soil, woodland, railroads, and a culture built greatly around agriculture to survive and even prosper.
I think the countries that would suffer more from peak oil would probably be places in Europe, India, and the middle easy.
The journey for our country towards better energy sources won't be east, but we will likely have it easier than many nations.

[TheDude]

I linked to that in another thread. Fun app.

[dukey]

probably with a dollar crash, u cant print trillions and expect the currency to hold its value

[Gorm]

well the dollar migth crash, but grain will not. The US produces a hole lot of grain.

But, the areas that will be hit hardest by peak oil I think is suburbian US.

[Grautr]

Being raised in the midwest, it makes it hard for me to believe that peak oil will be the end of America.
At least in my region people will find ways to deal with such issues.
We have more than enough fresh water, good soil, woodland, railroads, and a culture built greatly around agriculture to survive and even prosper.
I think the countries that would suffer more from peak oil would probably be places in Europe, India, and the middle easy.
The journey for our country towards better energy sources won't be east, but we will likely have it easier than many nations.

Agreed,
If we just look at the population density, which I think it will come down to in the end, then Europe, India and South East Asia are in for the roughest ride. That doesnt mean there wont be bad spots elsewhere. Anywhere with a high density urban population or none temperate climate will probably be nasty too.

[eXpat]

Being raised in the midwest, it makes it hard for me to believe that peak oil will be the end of America.
At least in my region people will find ways to deal with such issues.
We have more than enough fresh water, good soil, woodland, railroads, and a culture built greatly around agriculture to survive and even prosper.
I think the countries that would suffer more from peak oil would probably be places in Europe, India, and the middle easy.
The journey for our country towards better energy sources won't be east, but we will likely have it easier than many nations.

Although I agree that those living in the countryside will have it better than those living in urban/suburban locations, ask yourself, how many people in the countryside, cultivate like this?

Because this:

uses fuel, gas, oil based fertilizers and pesticides, commercial seeds, etc.

[hillsidedigger]

Being raised in the midwest, it makes it hard for me to believe that peak oil will be the end of America.
At least in my region people will find ways to deal with such issues.
We have more than enough fresh water, good soil, woodland, railroads, and a culture built greatly around agriculture to survive and even prosper.
I think the countries that would suffer more from peak oil would probably be places in Europe, India, and the middle easy.
The journey for our country towards better energy sources won't be east, but we will likely have it easier than many nations.

Although I agree that those living in the countryside will have it better than those living in urban/suburban locations, ask yourself, how many people in the countryside, cultivate like this?

Because this:

uses fuel, gas, oil based fertilizers and pesticides, commercial seeds, etc.

Draught animals generally only assist in growing enough more food to feed the draught animals.

They say one person working full-time all year can turn, plant, cultivate and harvest up to 5 acres with only a shovel and hoe (of easy enough to work ground) which should be enough for the farmer and a couple or 5 more people. I use this technigue although only work at it about 2 hours a day and work quite effectively over a half of an acre of extremely difficult ground. I'm clearing more land here and hope to be working 2 to 3 acres in a couple years, again with only a shovel, hoe, a few incidental small tools and organic methods.

It's easy to grow seasonal produce but growing a year-round diet is challenging. I also have a chicken run with a few dozen birds and try to grow their feed as well.

[ian807]

Being raised in the midwest, it makes it hard for me to believe that peak oil will be the end of America.
At least in my region people will find ways to deal with such issues.
We have more than enough fresh water, good soil, woodland, railroads, and a culture built greatly around agriculture to survive and even prosper.

During the famines in England in the 1700s, it was the city dwellers who had more food. Paradox, no? There was more economic pressure to ship there.

In all regions, people will starve. We're in population overshoot no matter how you look at it. Without oil and coal, people will die. And you in the Midwest will be producing a lot less with only horses and without petrochemical fertilizers and insecticides not to mention trivial little items like antibiotics and replacement parts. Having Monsanto-only crops won't help much either, since any sort of monoculture is more vulnerable to fungal and insect attack.

Some people will survive. Not all.

[pup55]

http://www.agry.purdue.edu/Ext/corn/new ... nd2007.pdf

I'm not saying you're wrong, but for further consideration look at the above document which says that the corn yield in Indiana in 1930 was about 25 bushels per acre. Compare this to the modern fertilizer-enhanced, heavily mechanized, irrigated agriculture system which has developed since we started using all of that fossil fuel to power our equipment, about 150. That's about what it is in Iowa too, as I recall generally.

To be sure, we will probably never go all the way back down to 25 because of the modern hybrids and other improvements made to the crops themselves. Then again, as a midwesterner I am sure you have tried to eat feed corn yourself at some point and found it to make you nice and regular, but not too good for people, so to switch to varieties of corn and other crops for people to eat, rather than raw materials for downstream use for feeding animals and other industrial processes (like feed corn and soybeans) will not be the easiest thing in the world either.

One other gap in this post-fossil-fuel scenario is the shortage of people who have, at any time in their lives, worked their asses off in the sun in some hot dry cornfield. You can say what you want about China, but according to the CIA world factbook, 43% of the nation is still employed in agriculture, and most of that is the hard way, where they issue you a shovel and a hoe and a plot of ground and tell you to have at it. In the US, 0.6% of the population feeds the rest of us. that means that 99.4% of us have no clue whatsoever what it is like to go out in the morning and shovel cow shit all day. How you are going to convince some of your squishier suburbanites to do this in order to survive will be a big problem.

The third problem: There is all of this land, and the population density is low, but whose land is it, and will they just let you move out there? Doubtful. A lot of the old homesteads have long ago been folded into giant corporate farms, with political influence and money, and they will be resistant to letting the rabble go out and farm a plot of it. Not to say it won't happen, but that whole system of land ownership will have to be re-thought out.

I suppose there are other problems. I do not know how far west you are, but out in Nebraska and Kansas there is the problem with the depletion of the aquifers, filled by the glaciers and mainly extracted in the last 30 years due to intense well digging and irrigation.... once that water is gone, you're going to have to wait until the next ice age for the deposits to be replenished....

You still have the sun. For now, that's free, but there are a few other problems that are going to make it really difficult to get to some other normal state than what we are right now.

I just hope it happens gradually enough for the farmers to adapt, and for the system to get to some stable state. The bright side of the whole ethanol disaster was that it showed the willingness of the farmers to do something different if properly incentivized. Maybe it will all work out. I hope so.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publication ... os/ch.html

[eXpat]

They say one person working full-time all year can turn, plant, cultivate and harvest up to 5 acres with only a shovel and hoe (of easy enough to work ground) which should be enough for the farmer and a couple or 5 more people. I use this technigue although only work at it about 2 hours a day and work quite effectively over a half of an acre of extremely difficult ground. I'm clearing more land here and hope to be working 2 to 3 acres in a couple years, again with only a shovel, hoe, a few incidental small tools and organic methods.

It's easy to grow seasonal produce but growing a year-round diet is challenging. I also have a chicken run with a few dozen birds and try to grow their feed as well.

That is true, and, by the way, I congratulate you for the way you set up yourself. However when people living here

that don´t know anything besides life in the city, are not feed anymore by the countryside, they are going to come to knock your door, even if it is only a fraction of the population that lives in the urban environment, it will be a lot of people there. People with immediate needs and zero experience, demanding help. Things will, in the end, set up the way you describe, but in the meantime, is going to be the hell of a time.

[dorlomin]

The most popular scenario—"Loose Nukes," chosen by 10.5 percent of Slate readers—combines modern and old-fashioned anxieties. "Taliban fighters wrest nuclear weapons from a destabilized Pakistan. Or al-Qaida acquires a small arsenal of nukes from a disintegrating Russia," the scenario description embedded in "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" reads. "The nonstate actors launch against the United States in an attack exponentially worse than 9/11." The presence of terrorists at the top of the charts indicates that we're still smarting from al-Qaida's 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon—perhaps the most recent event that raised momentary doubts about the country's continued existence. The fact that we envision those terrorists hitting us with nukes indicates that we have the same fears as the World War II generation. In the last 65 years, nothing has come along to supplant the scariness of a mushroom cloud.

You mean 911 times a hundred!!!! Who can save us from that?

[Gorm]

Fertilizers can be made with electricity, and diesel can be bio-diesel.

A lot can be done, and will be

[surfzombo13]

A few nuke tipped Scud missiles launched from a freighter in the Gulf of Mexico and detonated about 200 miles up would set off an EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) that would shut down all but the most sheilded electronics. America would, in a matter of seconds, be crippled beyond repair for at least a couple years and would probably not survive. And if it did, it would never ever be the same.

[dorlomin]

A few nuke tipped Scud missiles launched from a freighter in the Gulf of Mexico and detonated about 200 miles up would set off an EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) that would shut down all but the most sheilded electronics. America would, in a matter of seconds, be crippled beyond repair for at least a couple years and would probably not survive. And if it did, it would never ever be the same.

Not really they would be far better fired above the nothern states or even canada as EMP flux is heavily dependent on the earths magnetic field to channel. Also I cant rember the old SS-1's max altitude but I would be suprised at 200 miles. EMPs also have a very distinct pattern (sort of horseshoe IIRC) and much of CONUS would not be too heavily affected.

True a real Soviet era FOBS would frack up the US good proper but Im not sure a 15kt fire cracker would be more than a civil engineering emergency.

[kjmclark]

Being raised in the midwest, it makes it hard for me to believe that peak oil will be the end of America.

Having been raised in the midwest, and still living here, I think you're completely full of crap.

Of course, I live in Michigan, and if Michigan and Ohio are examples of what's going to happen in the midwest, we'll end up in an absolutely crushing depression. Not many of us around here making a living on the farm. And at this point, with ag costs not falling much, ag products dropping in price, and now ag land falling in value, the real farmers aren't doing too well either.

And in my part of the midwest, half of what I see is sprawl, marshmallows in SUVS, and McMansions on postage stamp lots. Dunno, maybe they could put up a grapevine on the side of their house. They'd probably like those pretty gold-colored bugs, until someone told them they were japanese beetles and that's what caused all the holes in the grape leaves.

[kjmclark]

They say one person working full-time all year can turn, plant, cultivate and harvest up to 5 acres with only a shovel and hoe (of easy enough to work ground) which should be enough for the farmer and a couple or 5 more people. I use this technigue although only work at it about 2 hours a day and work quite effectively over a half of an acre of extremely difficult ground. I'm clearing more land here and hope to be working 2 to 3 acres in a couple years, again with only a shovel, hoe, a few incidental small tools and organic methods.

You, my friend, must have some awfully whussy weeds. I have ten acres and I'm busting my butt at least 6 hours a week fighting off giant ragweed, canada thistle, musk thistle, burdock, smartweed, ragweed, lambsquarter, etc., etc. Whoever could work 5 acres must have had sand for soil. We could spend 2 hours a day harvesting in our garden.

Come to think of it, that must have been in sand, in the south somewhere. Where else can you work "full-time all year" turning, planting, and harvesting? Around here there's snow on the frozen ground for four months of the year, and most of our soil is clay and gravel. I remember seeing lots of sandy soil on visits down south, though.

[kjmclark]

I linked to that in another thread. Fun app.

Yes sir! And thank you very much. Come to think of it, I need to go back and vote from this computer!

[hillsidedigger]

You, my friend, must have some awfully whussy weeds. I have ten acres and I'm busting my butt at least 6 hours a week fighting off giant ragweed, canada thistle, musk thistle, burdock, smartweed, ragweed, lambsquarter, etc., etc. Whoever could work 5 acres must have had sand for soil. We could spend 2 hours a day harvesting in our garden.
Come to think of it, that must have been in sand, in the south somewhere. Where else can you work "full-time all year" turning, planting, and harvesting? Around here there's snow on the frozen ground for four months of the year, and most of our soil is clay and gravel. I remember seeing lots of sandy soil on visits down south, though.

We have 10 acres also but only about 1.5 ares are cleared ot the second growth hardwoods, some in yard, a few fruit trees and berry vines, the house, driveway and just over a half acre, but increasing, in cultivation.

The ground is only frozen here for spells from November thru March and the soil here is eroded clay. The site is mostly North-facing and it's in the Southeast Blue Ridge foothills. Of course, the Blue Ridge foothills extend from Georgia to Pennsylvania. My greatest weed problem is crabgrass (and tree sprouts) but crabgrass the latest to come out and the earliest to die, even before frost and doesn't grow at all or dies during dry periods which are becoming more and more typical here the last 10 or more seasons.


It seems that tilling or plowing, broad irrigation and the use of broadcast synthetic fertilzers encourages the growth of weeds.

About chickens which I mentioned earlier: The chickens are not for meat for it takes the growing of 6 to 10 pounds of feed to produce a pound of chicken meat. The chickens are to produce high-nitrogen chicken litter. Some eggs are a bonus but the high calcium and phosphorous chicken carcasses are generally planted in the gardens. The chickens are let out of the chicken-run each late afternoon to run and eat bugs, seeds, plants, etc. and they return to the lot on their own before dark. Of course, having 300 pounds of meat running live just outside would be taken advantage of during a food emergency.

I might add that almost any adult, anywhere could start to learn to grow some food plant and that is a start for it does take awhile to learn.

[OutOfGas]

Peak oil will destroy global trade and the standard of living will decrease in the US.
There will still be oil, but if will be used for food production and the military.
Only the very rich will have autos.

Manufacturing will be on a more local basis and people will walk to work or use mass transit.
Since we still have coal, electricity will still be avalible, but probably on a limited basis.

When the electric grid fails, the zombies will pour out of the cities and TSHTF.