You won’t like downsizing

We are about to enter a period of permanent decline, be sure you know what that will mean.

‘Downsizing’ isn’t going to be a gradual shift into a state of bucolic peasantry where life carries on as it always has, with a few minor changes.
The slightest slowdown of our current economy by just a few percentage points brings an immediate chaos of unemployment and global destabilisation.

Transport

In the face of imminent global chaos, whether through climate change, overpopulation or energy depletion, vast amounts of money are being poured into development of alternative methods of transportation. Elon Musk, though producing a first class electric car, proposes it to be a vehicle for the ‘post oil’ age.

The basic reality is ignored, that no road vehicle in the context of modern usage can function without an infrastructure that is itself a construct of hydrocarbon. But the electric car adds to the socio-economic complexity of our over-stressed life support system, it does not simplify it.

Yet our focus on such dead ends as the electric car shows that humankind does not have the means to rid itself of dependence on the wheel. While the electric car might appear to be a bright shiny symbol of continuing wealth and…