We can't be told that resources were used/squandered unsustainably!

The standard leftist or progressive narrative goes like this: The Far-Right Takes power. The rich get their way, don't pay taxes, government services are slashed, poor people starve, workers die at work because of loose regulations, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and more miserable.

Well, if ultimately peak oil problems are due to human consumption, would all that poverty actually be good? It means less consumption. The economy will in effect shrink, GDP shrinking is actually a noble goal in the environmentalist paradigm. People don't buy cars, more bike lanes get made because those are cheaper than roads that carry 80000 lb 18 wheeler trucks.

The oil companies pump more of a finite resource out just to have no demand and creating the need for sustainable alternatives. The old will perish first, who are one of the biggest government expenditures. After they all die, more money can be spent on child welfare for the smaller next generation who will actually play outside because phones and TVs will get too expensive.

Funding for education is slashed, and children go back to basic reading in a small wooden shack. That's actually healthier and easier to repair and cheaper overall for the same effects.

So even if the far-right is not your preferred way, there are still reasons to be optimistic about those political climates.

Something lost upon the secular or "spiritual but not religious" people in North America is that Christianity, especially American Evangelicalism's identity is about spreading the religion. This happens through a large and complicated missionary system that works both locally and abroad. Missions are not just events, they are swathes of land that usually double as schools and orphanages that operate as a base of operations where missionaries live and work to provide education and support for poor communities parallel to their religious evangelization. This requires a lot of air-travel and so churches have incentive to advocate for Big Oil in any attempt to bring down the cost of air-travel, which in turns allows them to fulfill their religious identity. As energy becomes more scarce, missions will struggle to stay open and many Christians will have an identity crisis and angst because they can no longer fulfill their identity. In Liberalese that would be the equivalent of rising prices for hormones that made transition prohibitively expensive for transgenders (even adult ones). They will, and we have started to see it in America, begin to agitate in socially destructive ways in their despair. Roe V Wade's destruction was a cry for help, not just bigotry for shits and giggles. Get ready for bigger shake ups if Peak Oil is actually happening.

Then onto the second largest religion which is also missionary, Islam. To be a Muslim is not to raise the Arab ethnicity as some kind of chosen race, nor is it defined as the adoration of the leader of whoever happens to be the custodian of Mecca, be it the Ottomans or the Saudi Royal family today. It is no surprise though that the Kingdom has funneled the oil money to expand Masjid Al-Haram (Mecca), missionary work (mostly into Africa), and promote international Hajj. The Kingdom is seeking to diversify its economy which may be a sign they are internally realizing they can't increase oil production anymore. So my hope is that the international Muslim community coerces (they should not ask politely) the House of Saud to make further renovations to Mecca and transition their country's economy to accommodate larger Hajj travelers. Hajj takes energy, so these expansions need to improve on efficiency (they have built rail for the process) and allow for the poorest of Muslims to participate, which may be the Gulf States if the energy fat days are over. A collapse into poverty may result in a surge in religion as identity, and just as with the Christians, making that identity harder to fulfill is just asking for problems.

Religions appears to be in decline in the West, and being energy literate one can see that a decline in religion is related to energy consumption so a decline in energy use may very well reverse this process, and the world in general is getting more religious not less. The world population has increased by billions since the 70s and atheists account for less in absolute terms than they did back then since the collapse of the Soviet Union. So to conclude for those who see the energy graph start to enter negative slope, please be considerate of what this means for religion and religious people. I have seen the oil field works of West Texas make the most money of their lives during the boom years, and the shock and far-right reactionary despair they are vulnerable to when a mass layoff hits yet again. As Slavoj Zizek has recently stated in Christian Atheism: They were in hell, with no God to protect them, and Christ was there.

https://skogslars.blogg.se/2024/april/the-youtubevideo-interview-with-alister-hamilton-global-oil-depletion-2.html

I wanted to post this article and discussion to /r/collapse as a serious effort-post with about 10 paragraphs about how the public misunderstands what's happening but failed because I can't articulate the direct path linking abstract, systems-theorist models of EROEI decline with the concrete real world manifestations of decline.

I want to fix this and I don't know where to begin. If there is some podcast guest whose book I can read, that would be a great help compared to my plan B of reading the bibliographies at the back of Alice Friedemann's books. Does anybody here know of any?

https://skogslars.blogg.se/2024/march/modelling-the-accelerated-decline-of-global-conventional-crude-oil-minus-condensate-production-with-data-from-steve-st-angelo-2.html

https://skogslars.blogg.se/2024/march/something-about-stealth-peak-oil.html