Reply #44: Welp, People are going to have to get used to it [View All]

The fact is that Americans are gas guzzling and extraordinarily wasteful. They've created an unsustainable lifesyle, relying on cheap petroleum inputs in myriad systems that they've come to accept as "normal" living patterns- and those are going to change as the moving average for petroleum prices steadily rises.

AND IT WILL RISE STEADILY.

Anyone who doesn't believe that is either in uniformed, in denial or simply delusional. It matters not a lick whether one person feels sorry for people who are going to suffer or not.

When the tipping points in the subsystems with smaller margins will come to pass is anyone's guess- just as their collective effect on larger economic systems in cities and communities is anyone's guess. But they will happen. And probably sooner rather than later.

Reading the responses in this thread, I'm not terribly optimistic that even reasonably well informed people have come to accept that in the next decade or two, their drive in utopia is headed for a collision course with an apparantly little known (and even less respected) concept called entropy.