Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World

I first learned of Mike Ruppert through a chilling trailer for his then upcoming movie, Collapse. Ruppert has a long history as an investigative journalist that began when he broke away from the mainstream after his excellence in the LA police led him to be actively recruited by the CIA for running cocaine through South-Central LA. Ruppert realized this wasn’t the world he’d pledged to serve and tried to break the story only to find that the systems he was working to support were quite different from how we perceive them in the mainstream. I went to the Vancouver International Film Centre with a few friends for a screening of Collapse only to have my tentative notions of civilizational instability confirmed in a tour de force of face melting facts. I quickly got a hold of Ruppert’s latest book, A Presidential Energy Policy, which had been re-printed as, Confronting Collapse to draw more attention to the work which had been largely ignored. Explaining bad news is not a route to popular success, as witnessed by the rapid end to careers of any American politician over the last 20 years that tried to curb deficits by cutting spending or raising taxes.

Confronting Collapse is a far better introduction to the topic of Collapse for the lay person than the corresponding movie is. And I say that because it is possibly too easy to write off Ruppert as a crank and a lunatic on-screen when he’s talking about governments breaking down and a global population that might face a huge die-off. This is so far outside the mainstream narrative that most people who aren’t receptive to it will completely block it out. It is much harder to ignore the case Ruppert makes for industrial civilization’s collapse when it is nicely footnoted and indexed. Ruppert’s writing style is absolutely clear and accessible to someone that isn’t a technically adept reader but might come across as “arrogant” for someone unwilling to look at the evidence. Modern economists counter the claims of the Peak Oil/Collapse theorists by saying that market corrections will solve the problem, Ruppert clearly explains that the only market corrections available will be in the form of tremendous suffering and loss of human life.

In the book, Dr. Colin Campell sets the stage by discussing the short time humanity has had access to energy dense petroleum reserves (only about 150 years). Ruppert uses the first chapter to make the case on why the US Federal government might keep the severity of the energy supply situation confidential and why we might question the status quo on this issue, “if we were lied to about mortgages, 401(k)s, stock portfolios, hedge funds, derivatives, insider trading… the invasion of Iraq and torture… why do so many accept on faith everything we have been sold about energy?”

Ruppert is clear that he views the entire American political and economic system as broken and corrupt and subservient to corporate/financial interests. This is something that neither Barack Obama or John McCain were willing to confront in their naive energy policies and political solutions. Thus the reason no real leadership exists and America/The World might be headed off a very steep and disturbing cliff in the near future. This assumption might lose some readers right away but if you read further, you can see why Ruppert has reached these conclusions.

The case for collapse is made by Ruppert in his connection between the financial system and oil supplies/energy flows. Growth of this economic system is impossible because recent oil reserve discoveries (they are all in hard to reach places like 6 miles under the ocean) do little more than confirm the fact that extraction rates of oil supplies will continue to rapidly decline, leading to a quick and painful dissolution of the mechanisms of modern society. If our infrastructure was able to handle such a decentralization, America would be in better shape, but Ruppert destroys that myth by dissecting and reporting facts regarding global oil and gas infrastructure ( trillion in investment needed by 2030 to support the global energy-supply infrastructure), the electric distribution grid (coal supplies need oil for extraction), roads and bridges (a .6 trillion investment needed to avoid bridges collapsing), an over-reliance of commuting (asphalt prices and their tie to oil, impact of driving on economic growth in America) and the alternative energy infrastructure (which does not and will not exist).

For Ruppert, Iraq is confirmation that the US government knows what is about to happen to global energy supplies, if we are fighting over the scraps of the remaining global oil fields that isn’t good news. Since Obama hasn’t even begun to withdraw from Iraq or Afghanistan supports this notion. By the time Mike Ruppert ties together the dependence of our food system on cheap petroleum (10 calories of petroleum for every calorie of food, not counting for transport),…

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