Hello America

The conversation turned, as it will these days, to the end of the civilization, via a combination of peak oil and environmental collapse. What amazes me during these conversations is how optimistic everyone is.

“America will come up with something, if they put their minds to it.” He paused. “They put a man on the moon, so I don’t see why they can’t make hydrogen fusion power work.”

I hope so. It would be a shame if greed and selfishness prove stronger than the desire to preserve civilization for our grandchildren. There’s a brilliantly prescient passage in J.G. Ballard’s Hello America (written after the oil hikes of the seventies) which imagines what would happen if we don’t come up with a solution:

All over the world industrial production began to falter. Stock markets slumped, avalanching numerals in Wall Street, the Bourse and the City of London showed all the signs of an even greater recession than the 1929 Crash. By the mid-1990s the automative giants of the United States, Europe and Japan had cut car production by a third. As armies of workers were laid off, hundreds of component manufacturers were forced into bankruptcy, factories closed, dole queues formed in once prosperous suburbs.