[Pops]

This is a poll but it isn't multiple choice, it's an essay question.

I was playing around with the wayback machine looking at some of my first posts, this is from seven years ago around the time po.com first went online, June 2004:

My short-term concerns are primarily the precarious condition of the economy. Bubbles, bubbles everywhere, real estate over exuberance, weak dollar, current account deficit, huge federal, state and personal debts, jobless recovery. A short-term political or terrorist induced oil crunch could be devastating to this house of cards. Long term I’m still worried about the economy and my non-expert energy outlook is flat and even declining prices for maybe 5-8 years, then at first gradual then accelerating increases thereafter.

That's was my medium term forecast of the future. I was certainly off on the part about oil prices doing anything gradually but I was good enough on to the housing and debt bubbles. I was really surprised at the fast rise in crude up to the '08 top just like everyone else but the blow it dealt the economy was no surprise, we'd already been talking about that here at PO in the first months. Drawing a trendline through that spike and plunge however makes me look like a better soothsayer with a near constant escalation in price.

On housing... Seven years ago, housing had been appreciating for at least a dozen years with no drop in our area - the normal cycle historically was 5-8 years. Housing had really boomed on commuters in those years so we were was particularly vulnerable to oil prices. Out there prices are down 60% or more and unemployment is 17%

A couple big dots I missed were: China, ethanol

That's how my crystal ball worked 7 years ago, now how about another 7 years into the future?

My WAG is though we're past cheap (conventional) oil today, we haven't past peak liquids and won't in the next 7 years, at least not because of geologic constraints. The price will depend on the economy of course but it won't stray out of the recent Brent/OPEC basket range of $90-$130 for any length of time. Production costs will support the bottom and price rationing will support the top.

Speaking of the economy, it's peaked. In fact, except for some geegaws from Apple, it probably peaked 7 years ago for the most of us. There will be punctuation marks of course, recurrent boom/busts like always but the swings will be sharper and shorter with the overall trend turning to a long flatline as automation continues to increases productivity and frugality reduces consumption. No collapse (in most places) but not the Jetsons either.

I think we'll be able to see some historic trends reversing: urban areas growing, we'll walk and ride more and drive less, we'll live in bigger households and smaller houses, there'll be fewer jobs and fewer SKUs.

My biggest concerns are more social than economic. People now are more grounded in economic reality than in '04 so they will at least try to heed the price signals the markets are sending about energy, food and jobs. But as we've seen over the last 7 years, people can get really ugly when their bubble pops. In the US I think we'll become more polarized not less as the economy stagnates. I'd hope for a big realignment of the political parties and perhaps an anti-corporate, anti-plutocrat faction to emerge but that would be wishful thinking.


Anyway, where are we compared to where you thought we'd be 7 years ago?
Where do you think we'll be 7 years down the road?

.

[Pops]

current account deficit, huge federal, state and personal debts,

I forgot to mention this but you know about it already.

[Bill Hicks]

Well, 7 years ago I wasn't Peak Oil Aware yet, so I'd say I figured we'd be doing pretty much the same as we always have.

As for 7 years from now? I'd say that the last vestige of the facade of the U.S. political system as we known it all of our lives will finally give way, and some kind of truly authoritarian regime will have taken its place. Debt default will likely have happened by then, meaning all of the EFT payments to individuals will have stopped. The hallucinatory debt-based economy of the past 30 years will be dead as a doornail. Military units will have been recalled from overseas to try and maintain order here in the homeland.

Conditions in America will likely very much resemble that described in the visionary sci-fi novel, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, in which the protagonist is trying to live her life as economic collapse, massive civil unrest and violence, and political breakdown swirl in the background around her before finally consuming her and her family.

[Pops]

pstar I was looking at the "6 years and nothing's changed" thread from last year and you said something to the effect:
'who knows, some guy in Riyadh could start a protest and take an entire exporting country offline'

Just thought I'd give your crystal ball a +1 for that premonition!

[Ibon]

Here is something I wrote July 2, 2005

Objectivity in projecting into the future is always challenging because when predicting we are tainted by the reality of the moment. And it doesn't look good at the moment when you drive down any suburban boulevard or look at the current politics in America. We all agree that this American dream is an illusion, right? Unsustainable, right? If it is all such an illusion than why do we assume that it is so solid that our culture can or will not evolve out of it once the external pressures of Peak Oil are felt and we are forced to change? I think the reason many of us believe that our society cannot change is because we are witnessing the most unprecedented warped government that America has ever had. Our current administration wants to preserve the "American Dream" and will do everything including war to achieve this. There is no vision coming from Washington except one of domination and fear in dealing with the upcoming energy crisis. Why do I believe that collapse will not happen? Because a government who governs with fear and domination has no survivability (witness how America has plunged at an accelerated pace toward bankruptcy during the past 8 years). The only thing I see collapsing in the years ahead is this administration. You know that odd fact that the moment that Hubbert's peak happens is the moment that we are producing the most oil and that we only realize the peak happened looking back afterwards? That is a good analogy of our current government. The moment that our government seems the most incompetent, omnipotent and threatening is the moment looking back when we will recognize that it started to fall apart. I think we can look ahead to a radical shift in the American political landscape in spite of all the bad news out there. It wont be idealism that will drive this shift but the realism of dealing with the energy crisis (One could argue that the problem with our current administration is that they are driven by an unsustainable idealism!).

That was 7 years ago. So where are we today?
It seems that this catalyst I predicted hasn't yet kicked in!
Radical shift in the American political landscape? Didn't happen
The bankruptcy of our government. Did happen.

In the next 7 years?

Global economic engine slows
Increased awareness that economic growth has limits
US remains in a chronic recession, no real collapse.
Frugality, growing food and fixing stuff becomes sexy.
Current generation entering into adulthood will represent the first generation since WWII to have felt the consequences of flat to declining economic growth and will therefore represent the beginning of a shift toward sustainability instead of growth.

[PrestonSturges]

Seven & seven? Make mine a double!

[AgentR11]

by rwwff » Sun Apr 30, 2006 8:07 pm
I think, also, you may be missing my point about these fields. Its not that their exploitation or not will effect the achieving of a final peak in production. It is a long term point about available assets in a post peak environment. In a certain way, this feels to me like a cruel game the US is playing with the rest of the world. We are trading pretty paper to acquire everyone elses useful goop. As the rest of the world starts to max out, we poke all the bad actors in just the wrong way in order to run up the price of oil. The price of oil, in a macro scale, begins to force US consumers to make appropriate choices concerning energy efficiency; then as the rest of the world finally urps up the last of the last of its easy oil, the US (with the excuse of unsustainable medicare and SS expenses or some other jibber jabber) monitizes its debt, leaving all those fools out there holding green toilet paper, while the US stands in possession of what will then seem like ridiculously huge productive oil fields.

The heart of American capitalism, trade nuthin for something and give nuthin back.

Simple version. Use theirs. Save ours. When they run out.... Just smile while holding the MP5

I joined here in 2006, so that's not quite seven... Don't know why I was thinking about H&K MP5's at the time..... (was Stargate still running back then?)

So.. basically proceeding as I thought, we're pumping a trillion a year in magic money, and the world is stuck in a horrible place of being unable to say no, while knowing they are being brutally screwed. We still have the same regions off limits for production here domestically; and we've run up the price of oil pretty well. Its holding near a $100 in the midst of pretty nasty economic conditions.

There's been a bit of consumer reaction to increased gas prices, but still more that needs to come.

I did originally think that monetization would occur in a large pulse,

Next seven.. tougher to say...

We've gone to QEx cycles where the debt is never retired, but simply rolled, continually, forever, with the interest paid in magic money. As long as interest is paid in something you can print, it is completely sustainable. Always some crisis to justify it. So, it should be clear that the creation of magic money is intentional, and will not halt. No level of taxation could close the gap at this point, and the problematic drivers are programs that have "such funds as are necessary" appropriations language that no one will touch. The Nobility in the US are closer to being apparent and obvious for what they are, but that they are diverse with no King makes them an amorphous blob that is immune to decapitation strategies that worked in prior centuries. Both parties will continue to serve the Nobility's economic interests while holding firm to very different and honest points of view on many social and individualistic ethics issues. The next big crisis will happen when production solidly starts ticking down, and the rest of the world looks at all that green monopoly money, then looks at US oil production still doing its thing, and now with newly opened reserves... they will not be happy. It might not be the excess of crazy consumption of the 20th century; but there are going to be a lot of folks out there jealous of our continuing 6-8 mbpd production.

I still hold that I couldn't come up with a more perfect, malevolent plan to deal with the reality of peak oil and climate change than what is being executed right now, in our names, in the US.

[Bill Hicks]

Bill, ordered and received said book (was that your earlier recommendation?). Will comment.

But I suspect you give the book too much credence. No one knows how the future will play out; fast crash, slow deterioration, epidemic-population-decline, fascist police state, nuclear annihilation, AGW meltdown. Heck we might even succeed in creating a Ecotopia or unobtainium/fusion Paradise The choices are endless. We do know that things have changed radically (AAA downgraded AA+) and will continue to do so. Hang on, this is the ride of your life.

On my blog, I recreated my long standing Top 10 TEOTWAWKI novels list from the old LATOC forum, so you might have seen it in one of those two places.

I'd like to think there is still a chance for some good things to come out of collapse, but I look around every day and just don't see in in our mindless, self-absorbed culture.

I might say about RAOSV that the book is NOT a peak oil scenario and was written in 1994 in the middle of the oil glut years. But the way the author described society flying apart sent a chill up my spine when I first read it not long after becoming peak oil aware.

[Loki]

I try not to make predictions, but I do play with “scenarios.” Maybe a weasel word for prediction

Not sure about the details of what scenarios I was considering 7 years ago, I didn't write them down in my journal. I joined PO.com in 2006, by which time I was thinking a Great Depression scenario was likely.

On Jan 2, 2007, I wrote the scenario below about the time period from 2007 to 2015. Not sure if I posted this on PO.com, I'm guessing I didn't.

I was right about a lengthy recession, double-digit unemployment, and a collapse in demand for housing (surprisingly, since the housing market wasn't really on my radar at the time) by 2010. I probably overemphasized the role of peak oil and definitely didn't consider the house of cards that the financial sector has built out of our economy. I also exaggerated the noticeable increase in homelessness and alcoholism, among other things.

We've had inflation, but not as bad as in my scenario (I said double-digit). I also didn't properly account for the differential effects of a recession based on class, age, occupation, and location (lots of folks in the US are feeling the hurt of the recession, but there are still plenty of Americans living large).

By 2015 I wrote that we'd be in a full blown Great Depression with 30%+ unemployment. Guess we'll see how that prediction pans out....

January 2, 2007

A SCENARIO

The American economy continues to chug along its current trajectory for the next few years, slowly crumbling for the masses while the elite reap an obscene bounty. We enter a “recession” that, in a few years, looks suspiciously like a depression, in part triggered by highly volatile and rapidly rising oil prices. Fedgov plays statistical magic with the figures, but even they are forced to admit double-digit unemployment by 2010. But most people are still employed, though their hours have been cut and their real wages devalued because of inflation. The homeless population increases, but most don’t notice as the great majority of the newly homeless live in their cars. Alcohol and drug problems get worse. Jobs become harder and harder to find, the want ads dwindle in size, and if you get a job, you do anything you have to do to keep it. Older people are forced to go back to work as their fixed incomes become worth less and less with every year of double-digit inflation. Most people are forced to forgo luxuries. Cars get progressively older as no one can afford to buy new ones. The highways are still clogged, but most vehicles have two or three people in them. Exotic vacations are largely a thing of the past. People are forced to share apartments, or stay with their parents longer and longer. The number of yard sales explodes as people sell their possessions to pay the rent. But for the most part, American life in 2010 is as it was in 2005, only slightly less so.

Because our way of life is not negotiable, the American body politic reacts to these developments by reducing environmental protections and busting unions in the name of economic development. Since our last disastrous resource war in Iraq, the American public has lost stomach for crusades (for now at least), but we continue to occupy most of our outposts in the Empire. Rumblings against Iran, or some other brown-skinned bugaboo, abound, but everyone knows we can’t afford it, and no one will lend us the money. We try to drill our way out of the oil shortage, but few companies are willing to risk investing in such a chaotic environment, and whatever we do find doesn’t even come close to covering our domestic oil demand. We open up the national forests to logging, but companies are reluctant to bid on the timber when housing demand has collapsed. But the tar sands, coal fields, and natural gas deposits are all sucked dry, and the earth left to heal on its own.

By 2015 the realities of Peak Oil are clear. Production has been plateauing for years, and no new major discoveries have been made. The eroding economic conditions in the United States reduce demand somewhat, but global demand continues to exceed supply. The United States is in a full-blown depression. The TV news now uses the term casually, though the fedgov still prefers “recession.” Unemployment exceeds 30%, and many of those who do work are underemployed. Co-housing becomes necessary for nearly everyone, and extended families living under one roof becomes more common. Everything costs more, sometimes a lot more. Store shelves aren’t as bountiful as they once were—empty shelves have become so common they no longer warrant notice. More and more people grow gardens, and stay home on their time off rather than travel. Petty theft and street crime get worse. Alcohol poisoning and drug overdose cases skyrocket. Potholes don’t get fixed as fast as they used to, and sometimes don’t get fixed at all. People rarely drive alone—they can’t afford it. Electricity is still available, but it isn’t as reliable as it used to be, and it’s a bit “browner.” The year 2015 concludes with no end of the Greater Depression in sight. On the contrary, things seem to be getting worse with the passage of every year, and there’s no end to the Troubles in sight.

[basil_hayden]

7 Years ago I was naive and thought it was a geologic problem.

PO.com and all the brainiacs and fringe freaks have taught me that on top of the geologic problem, it's a geopolitical - social-population-monetary policy-biological-and everything else problem.

7 years from now, we'll be about three years into the next world war.

[vision-master]

Seven & Seven

Did I miss sumthing?

[highlander]

TPTB are a lot better at kicking the can down th eroad than i imagined. Right now, i see far too many brush fires going at one time for them to be contained. What does it look like down the road? Poorer, much poorer.