Re: SC76

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/46564

America’s self-inflicted societal collapse

Our Legacy

Perceptions of our future…


American Mainstream Perspective


The mainstream believes that America is still the land of opportunity—every American generation must and will have it better than the last. Our American way of life is the model for the rest of the world; it will last for hundreds or even thousands of years, perhaps forever. “The American Way” will prevail—because we want it to…


Concerned Citizens Perspective


Concerned citizens believe that we must adopt a downscaled version of our American way of life—we must curtail our orgy of excess, address our ecological and economic problems, and transition, with minimal lifestyle disruptions, to a “more sustainable”—not “sustainable”, just “more sustainable”—way of life.


Reality


The inevitable consequence associated with our continued blind adherence to “the American Way” is imminent societal collapse—we are grossly overshot ecologically and technically bankrupt economically. Attempts to become “more sustainable” will, at best, only temporarily delay our inevitable collapse. And, should we opt to transition voluntarily to a sustainable lifestyle paradigm through the implementation of an ACR ( American Cultural Revolution ), we will still experience population level and material living standard reductions on the order of 80%. There can be no soft landing.


The Real “Inconvenient Truth”


Unfortunately, the probability that we will choose to modify our distorted worldview and our dysfunctional resource utilization behavior is essentially zero. We will not implement an American Cultural Revolution; and we will not opt to transition voluntarily to a sustainable lifestyle paradigm. As human beings, and especially as self-entitled Americans, we have demonstrated little capacity for self-limiting behavior—especially if it involves drastic reductions to some combination of our population level and material living standards.

We simply lack the collective will to reduce voluntarily our ecological/economic “footprint” to a sustainable size, and to live forever within the constraints imposed by that reduced footprint.

Instead, we will use the remaining ecological and economic resources available to us in futile attempts to perpetuate our American way of life at all costs, even as we encounter increasingly severe resource supply shortages and disruptions. Nature will inevitably intervene through disasters, disease, pestilence, and famine to force our transition to sustainability through societal collapse—unless we annihilate ourselves in the meantime through domestic and international resource wars.

We may have forgiven ourselves for being uninformed or misinformed; but Nature has not forgiven anybody.........