353 comments on The Expected Economic Impact of an Energy Downturn
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353 comments on The Expected Economic Impact of an Energy Downturn
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GAIA Host Collective
Things may need to be taken care of, but I suspect that they won't. If there is no Department of Education, each school will be on its, and any funding will be allocated on the basis of the simplest possible formula. If there are not enough funds for prisons, some excuse will be made to let the prisoners out early. Medicaid will go away too, if there are not funds for it.
I also heard the NJ State Department of Agriculture, as well as funding of equipment acquisitions for volunteer fire departments (as if they don't get paid little enough as is).
I live in NJ too and was a volunteer fire fighter a couple of years ago. I'm not sure that the state has ever had a significant hand in providing money for local departements to buy gear. Most of the money comes from private donations or fire distric taxes. Still, the budget situation in NJ is something to be concerned with. Gov. Corzine, as far as I'm concerned, is being realistic about the situation, and a lot of people in the state assembly simply don't want to face up to reality.
California has a 16 BILLION dollar deficit... so you can imagine the cuts going out here on the left coast.
Todd
If I were a lender, I would have serious questions about lending California anything, with that kind of deficit. California looks like a problem waiting to happen.
California is a problem in progress.
Interesting that the Bush regime has brought down three sitting Democratic governors. Gray Davis in California by recall, Don Siegelman in Alabama by dubious prosecution, and Eliot Spitzer in New York State by combing his financial records. (Spitzer is shamefully guilty, but his offenses were uncovered by opposition research. Siegelman seems to have been railroaded.)
The "no growth" situation cannot be recognized too soon.
I wasn't able to quickly find the last time that the CA budget was actually balanced, but it's been broken for a long time. At least 10 years, but my memory says much longer than that. We've been running on borrowed money forever. As in many other things, CA is a microcosm of the bigger picture, and it wouldn't suprise me a bit if, in the same way that we have led the country in pursuit of renewable energy and emissions controls, we also lead it in playing out the inevitable end of the borrowing game.
Great work on this article, Gail! It's not a pretty picture but you told it straight and simply, and you did it well.
Governments downsizing is something that I hadn't really thought much about until I read Kunstler's new book "World Made By Hand", where the State government in Albany is down to one guy working alone in the Capitol building (He has no authority, everything is really run by a warlord). As for medical care, it's just a GP in the little town (Union Grove) which is the main setting. He has to brew up his own pain-killers and other medicines. Most awfully, there aren't any antibiotics to be had. (I personally hope Kunstler is wrong about the antibiotics. )
I think your presentation is good, but I wonder if many young people will be able to fully understand its implications. A few more concrete examples might be helpful: little by little we'll have a tough time getting and affording plastic; we won't be able to fix roads, so people will have a harder time to simply VISIT a doctor, etc.
I'll see if I can add an example or two.
If I give the talk to other audiences later, when I am not constrained to 20 minutes, I can add some more.
I've discovered when you say, "There may not be medications", I get a lot of arguments that this is the highest use, so of course we would have medications, even if we had nothing else. Also, if I say there may not be plastics, someone believes that since they take such a small share of the petroleum, surely they will be spared. And so on.
If this is a part of a group of talks, it is hard to know how much foundation the other speakers will have laid.
Gail, what a great way of expressing the problems of medications or any usage - somehow they end up broken down and we're still using as much oil as ever! That's very helpful to me when I run into these same questions.
Sharon
Hey! Make with the Spoiler Alert! Some of us are still checking the mailbox for our copy of WMBH.
Thought about buying it locally, yes.
Our grandparents' generation, our parents', our own, and perhaps our childrens', have had the great good fortune to have existed during the extremely narrow window in human history when fossil fuels were cheap and antibiotics actually worked.
Gail - Thank-you for writing a realistic unsanitzed version of events. We are so conditioned to the happy ending that this may sound downbeat. The post-peak world is a different landscape. The sooner we look at that reality and make adjustments the better.
There's a number of international organizations like The International Committee of the Red Cross, The International Organization for Migration, and UN activities like WFP that receive funding from the various member nations. Lots of these programs are already operating on a fairly tight budget and I'd guess things will get tighter still as nations look for places to cut. I doubt that donations will be especially forthcoming in hard times and there's probably some minimal funding level below which they just can't operate. (The bird with one wing can't fly witticism fits here.)
I often read here where folks assert that it's not possible for there to be a massive die-off in this day and time. Perhaps not here in the US (but I'm now so sure about that-things can happen very fast with a confluence of untoward events). Folks killed directly by warfare or a climatic disaster can't be prevented, but timely aid via these international programs can prevent lots of deaths and privation that sets in once the hurricane, volcano, earth quake, tsunami or whatever subsides.
I know from observing the response to the infamous hurricane Katrina that governments can be pretty callous about such things even when it strikes on the home turf and it's probably even easier to ignore if it's some little country somewhere in Africa.