Few dogs were around anymore. Some had been eaten during the hunger that followed the flu in the spring of that year. People didn't talk about it; it… - James Howard Kunstler

The 1973 was the precipitating incident of the OPEC embargo. On October 6, Egyptian and Syrian forces caught the Israeli military off-guard on the most solemn Jewish holiday, when many soldiers were home with their families. Because the Arab-Israeli dispute was commonly viewed as yet another cold war proxy battle, the United States and its allies naturally lined up behind Israel against the Soviet-sponsored aggressors. Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat implored the Saudis and other Muslim states to use the “oil weapon” against Israel’s allies. On October 12, the Saudi-led OPEC demanded of the various Western companies doing business in the Middle East, including Aramco, a 100 percent increase in the posted price of their cartel's oil. The companies stalled for time. On October 16, the Persian Gulf region OPEC members broke off negotiations with the Western oil companies and announced that thereafter they would set prices themselves. On October 17, the Israelis gained the upper hand on the battlefield, thanks in large part to aggressive American resupply efforts, and began to push the Egyptians back across the and the Syrians out of the Golan Heights. [On] the same day, the Arab oil ministers announced an oil embargo on the United States, while increasing prices by 70 percent to western Europe. Overnight, the price of a barrel of oil to these nations rose from $3 to $5.11. On October 19, President Richard M. Nixon announced a military aid package for Israel. The following day, Saudi Arabia retaliated by announcing a total cutoff of oil exports to America.

Many individual immune systems will be compromised by the hardships of the Long Emergency and disease will seize the opportunities presented, as it always has. AIDS ought to be especially worrisome, because even when people have lost everything, they still have sex. That may be all many people will have, and it will get them in a lot of trouble. Besides, as already suggested, the resourceful HIV bug may find an even more efficient means of transmission through countless random acts of mutation. Millions [and perhaps billions] of human beings are going to die. […] The attrition is apt to continue for much longer than the Black Death raged in the Europe of the fourteenth century,because under the regime of cheap [hydrocarbons like] oil the carrying capacity of our earthly habitats was exceeded by orders of magnitude, and we have farther to go to return to the solar carrying capacity-of our home places. Some home places, such as the deserts of Arabia and the American West, will support only minuscule numbers of people without the benefits of fossil fuels. Of course, there will be no compensations for the loss of those nonrenewable resources. Also, because of the… human contribution to global warming, this climate change might well be much more severe and longer-lasting than the blip of the early 1300s, or even the Little Ice Age of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Like China, the United States is divided… in half between wet and dry. Though the human population of the United States is proportionately much smaller than China's, the amount of effort America has expended on manipulating habitats and altering terrain is as impressive in its own way as China's birthrate. Especially significant is the stupendous amount of paving laid down in the United States during the past hundred years. It prevents rain from being absorbed as groundwater and sends it instead into rivers, and… into the ocean. The effect of this is the inability of water tables and wetlands to recharge and the diminishing ability of the terrain to support life. In the United States, only 2 percent of the country's rivers and wetlands remain free-flowing and undeveloped. As a result, the country has lost more than half of its wetlands.