Peak Oil fantasies scenarios

I don't really mean to ruin your day, but I'm going to reflect on some Peak Oil doomsday scenarios. I just finished the Kunstler Rolling Stone article, and boy, it's even worse than everything else I've read. He describes Life After Peak Oil in much more detail than anyone else, and it's some scary shit, yo.

Some highlights (these are taken from the article):

• Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away.
• Food production will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for decades. We can anticipate the re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring class. It will be composed largely of the aforementioned economic losers who had to relinquish their grip on the American dream.
• Neither of the two major presidential candidates in 2004 mentioned railroads, but if we don't refurbish our rail system, then there may be no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few decades from now.
• Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas....The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems, from poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss. The Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better prospects.
• The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage.

I try to think about what it means when my job, my city, my current way of life are obsolete. I suppose that when the world is in crisis, I won't worry about any of those things. Instead, we'll leave New York and move back in with our parents, if they're still alive, and use their land to grow things. I don't know how the economy will work, or if there will be centralized government anymore. Maybe those of you who are historians have a good sense of what life will be like--intensely local and reduced to the very basic professions of farming, medicine, and...I don't know what else.

Will that kind of life be meaningful to the modern human? Simply living to sustain ourselves? We'll no longer be hoping our acheivements will lead to the advancement of society, since we won't have the resources anymore. Is cultivating relationships with others and sustaining them over the years a satifying reason to live? I guess we will make it so--prior to the Industrial Revolution, that's primarily what life was about. And certainly it's still that way in poor rural villages in Africa and India, and those people presumably value their lives. (And ironically, they'll be least affected by Peak Oil.)

When the shit hits the fan, how are adults going to know what to do? How will we learn to convert our technological lifestyle to an agricultural one? It's not like these skills have been passed down by our parents. But I guess that we are resilient, and many of us will have the will to learn how to live in the post-Peak Oil world. If we don't have that will, we'll die.

I'll end with one last thought. Can we do anything about this now? Maybe, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen. You'd have to be the government or at least a geologist to make real headway these days. Maybe someday we'll march on Congress, but this is bigger than the US. India and China also have to realize what's happening, and that's harder for the individual to influence. So I think that the best thing to do is spread the word in hopes that something will catch at a higher-up level, but mostly to just be mentally prepared for when it hits.