Both the mining and the washing [of hydrocarbons] require huge amounts of energy, and it has been proposed that any commercial exploitation of the Al… - James Howard Kunstler

What is... not comprehended about this predicament is that the developed world will begin to suffer long before the oil and gas... run out. The American way of life... can run only on reliable supplies of dependably cheap [hydrocarbons like] oil and gas. Even mild to moderate deviations in... supply will crush our economy and make… daily life impossible. Fossil fuel reserves are not scattered equitably around the world. They tend to be concentrated in places where the native peoples don’t like the West in general [...], places physically very remote, places where we realistically can exercise little control [...]. [...] We can be certain that the price and supplies of fossil fuels will suffer oscillations and disruptions in the period ahead [...]. [...] The decline of fossil fuels is certain to ignite chronic strife between nations contesting the remaining supplies. These resource wars have already begun. There will be more of them. They are... to grind on and on [...]. They will only aggravate a situation that, in and of itself, could bring down civilizations. The extent of suffering... will certainly depend on how tenaciously we attempt to cling to obsolete habits, customs, and assumptions–for instance, how fiercely... [we] decide to fight to maintain suburban lifestyles that simply cannot be rationalized any longer.

employed a cast of volunteers… to act out roles following a script in which a terrorist released smallpox in one eastern U.S. city. The result was sobering to an extreme. The public health system virtually collapsed. Hospitals degenerated into chaos. Smallpox spread to twenty-five states and overseas. The national stockpile of vaccines proved to be deeply inadequate. The exercise was called off after four days from the sheer exhaustion of the participants, while the fictional epidemic was still spreading.

A UN ceasefire ended hostilities on October 22, 1973, but the OPEC embargo against the United States remained in force while the organization further increased the price per barrel to the rest of the world. What followed was an interesting case study in network breakdown and cascading failure. In fact, the embargo never actually achieved a shutoff of OPEC oil imports to the United States. All but about 5 percent of the needed supply found its way to America by a circuitous route as allocations to other nations were surreptitiously redirected. But the base price of a barrel of oil did eventually more than quadruple by the time the embargo was called off in March 1974. And the price rise, alone staggered the West and Japan. Already at that time, public transit was a thing of the past and about 85 percent of Americans drove to work every day.