The Oil Drum: Europe

This is a guest post by Aaron Newton, who is working with coauthor Sharon Astyk on the forthcoming book, A Nation of Farmers. Aaron contributes at Groovy Green; he also blogs at Powering Down. Aaron is a land planner and garden farmer in suburban North Carolina, seeking ways to transform the current course of human land use development in an effort to prepare for the effects of global oil production peak and its outcome on automotive suburban America. Aaron's post "The Four Day Work Week: Sixteen Reasons Why This Might Be an Idea Whose Time Has Come" has gotten a lot of national press lately as well.

In his book, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia, economist and former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, suggests that between 1966 and 1990, 80 million Soviet farmers urbanized stalling grain production and putting pressure on the government to use revenue from oil and natural gas production to buy grain from abroad. When fossil fuel production did not expand in such a way that provided increased profits for purchasing food the Soviets had to borrow foreign money to buy bread. Loans from the West came with strings attached. Those offering the credit demanded that the Soviets no longer use force to keep their states in line and political collapse, not famine, visited The USSR.

Dmitry Orlov's new book, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects, was published very recently. I pre-ordered a copy because Dmitry has had first hand experience with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he believes, as I do, that economic collapse is likely to come first, if a society is on an unsustainable course. The great mystery to me is what lies on the other side of an economic collapse.

In this book, Dmitry gives his view of what may be on the other side, and how one might prepare for it. Dmitry starts with a recipe for collapse of a modern military-industrial power:

The ingredients I like to put in my superpower collapse soup are: a severe and chronic shortage in the production of crude oil (the magic elixir of industrial economies), a severe and worsening trade deficit, a runaway military budget and ballooning foreign debt. The heat and agitation can be provided most efficaciously by a humiliating military defeat and widespread fear of a looming catastrophe.