Climate change, competition for water, and polluted water sources will also be exacerbated by failures in the electric grid caused by oil and gas sup… - James Howard Kunstler

Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson warns that China's current program to mitigate huge population increases with gigantic water projects may have dire consequences. Irrigation and other withdrawals have already depleted the , which, starting in 1972, has run bone-dry part of the year in province, where one-fifth of China's wheat and one-seventh of its corn is produced. In 1997, the river stopped flowing for a record 226 days. The groundwater levels of the northern China plains have plummeted. The water table in major grain-producing areas is falling at the rate of five feet a year. Of China's 617 cities, three hundred already face water shortages. Of China's approximately 23,000 miles of major rivers, 80 percent no longer support fish life. The Xiaolangdi dam project now underway along the Yellow River in north China is exceeded in size only by the on the in South China. In addition, the Chinese government intends to siphon water from the Yangtze… and send it over by a canal system to the Yellow River and Beijing, respectively. When it is running, the Yellow River is already one of the most particle-laden in the world. Because of that, it is estimated that the Xiaolangdi dam would silt up within thirty years of completion. The… project is reminiscent of another centrally planned mega-project that ended in grief: the Soviet Union's scheme to drain the to irrigate gigantic cotton farms in Kazakhstan. The project turned one of the world's largest inland bodies of fresh water into [a] salty desert. The potential for calamity in China is therefore huge as it skirts a range of forces presented by the Long Emergency, any one of which, or some combination, could send it reeling over its tipping point: the effects of global climate change, competition for [every resource including] oil, extremes of pollution, disease, and war, either with its neighbors or internally. Despite the current veneer of prosperity and stability, China has tremendous potential for political chaos. As Wilson fearlessly points out, the pressure on China's agriculture and water resources is intensified by the predicament shared by many countries: runaway population growth [caused by industrialization]. Population growth rates may be mitigated… from culture to culture by economic advance (which tends to lower reproductive rates by channeling women into the workplace), but economic development produces other not-so-benign consequences. Developing [systems like] nation[-state]s invariably increase their energy use [as they grow complex]. More cars are used, more electricity [is] generated, [and] more greenhouse emissions [are] sent into the atmosphere. In the Long Emergency, …“there will only be two types of nations: the over-developed and those which will never develop.” China may represent an amalgamation of those two conditions in one nation-state.

American life, with its twin engines of suburbanization and factory production of consumer goods for the […] world, became so quickly and obviously successful that a new consensus formed supporting the value of the dollar and its paper accessories in capital markets, chiefly stocks, and bonds. This is not to say that the securities markets boomed in the 1950s and 1960s—it took until then just to recover the value levels of the pre-1929 crash—but stocks and bonds did regain respectability, [and] legitimacy. Those who had lived through the Great Depression, meaning virtually all the men who had served in the wartime army, had very modest expectations about the role of finance in the postwar economy. In the 1950s and 1960s, Americans bought stocks for the annual dividends they paid, not to flip them for a quick profit. In fact, share prices remained […] very flat during this period. The whole notion of investment was different than it would become later in the twentieth century. In the 1950s and 1960s, stock and bond values were linked much more directly with the successful production of real goods. General Motors derived its profits and paid its dividends on the basis of auto sales, not as today, primarily from leveraging interest rates and other abstract numbers' games removed from the actual making of products. In sum, the public attitude about the role of finance was extremely conservative. Finance was not an “industry” per se, but a set of institutions designed to keep the idea of money and its accessories credible, […] to allow real industries to function.

The so-called global economy was not a permanent institution, [...] but a set of transient circumstances peculiar to a certain time: the… fossil fuel era. […] Factories could be started up in Sri Lanka and Malaysia, where swollen populations furnished trainable workers willing to labor for much less than those back in the United States or Europe. Products then moved around the globe in a highly rationalized system, not unlike the oil allocation system, using immense vessels, automated port facilities, and truck-scaled shipping containers at a minuscule cost-per-unit of whatever was made and transported. Shirts or coffeemakers manufactured 12,000 miles away could be shipped to s all over America and sold cheaply. […] Meanwhile, among economists and government figures, globalism developed... [as] an intellectual fad. Globalism allowed them to believe that burgeoning wealth in the developed countries, and the spread of industrial activity to formerly primitive regions, was based on the potency of their own ideas and policies rather than on cheap [and easy-to-find hydrocarbons like] oil. […] [An] overlooked [fact] is that [Margaret] Thatcher’s success in reviving England coincided with a fantastic new revenue stream from oil, as quaint old Britannia became energy self-sufficient and a net energy-exporting nation for the first time since the heyday of coal. Globalism then infected America when Ronald Reagan came on the scene in 1981. Reagan’s ‘supply-side” economic advisors retailed a set of fiscal ideas that neatly accessorized the new notions about free trade and deregulation, chiefly that massively reducing taxes would… result in greater revenues as the greater aggregate of business activity generated a greater aggregate of taxes even at lower rates. […] The rise of computers, in turn, promoted the fantasy that commerce in sheer information would be the long-sought replacement for all the played-out activities of the smokestack economy. A country like America, it was now thought, no longer needed steelmaking or tire factories or other harsh, dirty, troublesome enterprises. Let the poor masses of Asia and have them and lift themselves up from agricultural peonage. America would outsource all this old economy stuff and use computers to orchestrate the movement of parts and the assembly of products from distant quarters of the world, and then sell the stuff in our own s and s, which would become global juggernauts of retailing. […] It was also like a convoluted liquidation sale of the accrued wealth of two hundred years of industrial society for the benefit of a handful of financial buccaneers, with the great masses relegated to a race to the bottom as the economic assets are dismantled and sold off, and their livelihoods are closed […]. That this development was uniformly greeted as a public good by the vast majority of Americans, at the same time that their local economies were being destroyed—and with them, myriad social and civic benefits—is one of the greater enigmas of recent social history. In effect, Americans threw away their communities… to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping to reflect on what they were destroying.