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GLOBAL FUTURE ANALYSIS


SCENARIOS | DOING NOTHING


In times of sharp prices rise of energy and materials continuing in doing what we did in times of cheap energy and cheap materials is not a very rational valid option, but yet we still do it. What we are doing currently is completely designed for / based on cheap energy and cheap materials. When these two pillars are going the building that is based on those two is due to collapse. Absorbing this two huge (world changing) facts into our minds, companies and governments takes time. Filling our economic 'car' gets more expensive each day, leaving less purchase power for other economic 'things' in all budgets and the road we're currently on is ending and gets more less better / more rockier each day. This is shocking. We need some time to adapt this. But it is so simple. When everything we do is based on cheap energy, and cheap energy is gone, doing things differently seems the (only) right thing to do. Everybody not in denial of the fact that cheap energy is over will approve this. There are not many believers in cheap energy left, not in science, not in corporations, not in governments. Everybody agrees that energy will be severe more expensive in the future than it was in the past. That's quite something. Without awareness nothing happens ever. Awareness is the birth ground of any action. But not everybody (only some early adapters) has thought over the consequences of this expensive energy fact. We just know it only yet for several months and had also to go trough the denial phase first. Excepting the fact that the fundamentals of our current prosperity / economic system have gone away is not an easy thing to do. We have fight a stupid fight, not in solving it, but in denial, ignoring and joking around it, as the cheap energy based economic building is collapsing above our heads. It looks we are became stupid by denial. Giving our brains a blank spot holiday on the huge effect of energy prises/shortages on our lives. But the price reality has guide us very quick trough it. Prices don't lie, they educate. What if we do nothing? Just (against better knowledge in: cheap energy is gone) imaging that nothing needs to be done. Just let's do this now. Waiting for governments is stupid: they as slow as turtles if they ever will move. Our economies will collapse (higher energy prices, less other purchase power, end of economic growth, smaller economies). Our governments (and social/health/ public transportation systems are over due to 1) enormous economic stress 2) weak governments with no answers that live in the past 3) enormous amounts of geopolitical stress. The huge prosperity growth of the last decades is (beside to the availability of cheap energy) also due to the relatively geopolitical rest that was on the earth. The European countries has become prosperous when they stop fighting to each other. This geopolitical rest is one of the main environmental drives behind the recent prosperity boom. Like political environmental changes has boomed Russia and China. But 1) When financial markets collapse due the housing bubble and many banks/currencies will go bankrupt due to their investments into the US financial system and the US arrange a collapse of the dollar so that they not have to pay their debts, these countries will seize all US foreign assets and all US transport equipments (ships/planes) like USSR assets were seized globally after the collapse of the USSR, literally hold/brake global trade severely. 2) When energy and material prices first double and than triple and economies get into serious decline, the nations with a strong army (and the ability to pay for that army: not the same: see the USSR army around 1990) maybe will go to war, to 'get' the energy and materials they needed. Doing nothing ends in national chaos and international war. Period. Wishful thinking will not change this perspective. Take away the energy and our economies/societies stand still the same day and collapse the next day.


Author: Gijs Graafland


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