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That's cute, but have you heard about Russian propaganda about the US?

No, I haven't. What I have seen is a good deal of truthful facts and opinion about the US government and its policies. Some of it comes from Russia, some from Europe, some from the UK, Australia and Canada - and quite a lot of it comes from the USA itself.

Read the following (or as much of it as you can absorb) and see if what you learn is a little different from what the mainstream media are telling their audiences day after day.

http://russia-insider.com/en/o...
http://russia-insider.com/en/p...
http://www.strategic-culture.o...
http://www.paulcraigroberts.or...
http://awdnews.com/top-news/ru...
https://www.rt.com/news/387798...
http://michael-hudson.com/2017...
http://russia-insider.com/en/p...
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuc...
https://thearchdruidreport.blo...
https://irrussianality.wordpre...
http://johnhelmer.net/malaysia...
https://irrussianality.wordpre...

Suggest you read this:

http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/04/we-wish.html

Kunstler's op-ed piece provides some compelling counter-arguments arguments that are sadly cobblered up together with invectives to the point of being emotional. If we wanted emotional we could simply tune to BravoTV or some crap like that.

The "Atlantic" is simply running a hypothetical "what-if" scenario, and the potential consequences of it. It is a "what-if" (something you always want to see and debate if you are truly open-minded), not a "will-be" article as it is being presented (demonized/ridiculed) by the interweebz borg bovine-mind collective (many whom I'm sure have not had even RTFA in question, with the opening sentence quoted below):

New technology and a little-known energy source suggest that fossil fuels may not be finite. This would be a miracle—and a nightmare.

Again, it is a "what-if" article pointing to a nightmarish scenario, not a nilly-willy "fuck solar/wind, let's burn moar dino juize" corporate campaign. Sadly, the nuisance is missed to most.

Suggest you read this:

http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/04/we-wish.html

http://www.kunstler.com/mags_virtual.html

"One of the extremely painful lessons of our time, I'm convinced, will be that the virtual is not an adequate substitute for the real."

I agree (from my very own painful experience) with that general idea.

Of course what people tend to forget is that you can make gasoline from a lot of non petroleum sources including water and air. The only thing that prevents it is cost.

Exactly. It's not the unavailability of all of the fuel that is the issue, but how much it will cost, and more importantly how quickly that cost will increase. This rate of increase will determine whether we will be able to actually continue with this easy motoring way of life, or not. The higher the rate of increase, the less probability that we will be able to maintain the current way of doing things.

The cheapness of the fuel *is* the issue. Right now, diesel and gasoline still give the biggest bang for the buck.

See these (now quite well known) sites for more info: Kunstler and The Oil Drum

World oil production is about 85 million barrels per day and T. Boone does Not think it can be increased.

Currently the USA consumes about 23 million barrels of oil per day.

I watched as a man and his wife who had worked hard and lived fruggley say their nest egg which was at they time they retired worth a little more than the value of a house erode away while they sat on low interest long term mortgage investments

Saudi Arabia currently produces in the vicinity of 10 million Barrels of oil per day

Where does it go from here? Maybe oil will be priced in Euros? Maybe foreign investment will decline as the dollar drops?

Mod-parent up!

NA is truly screwed. There are no energy solutions that are going to meet our requirements. I am personally trying to figure out how to find a home that is cheap to purchase and heat/cool. I know that my current fuel-oil furnance is going to only more and more expensive.

and oh yeah, read kunstler!
http://www.kunstler.com/

This is to the grand-parent post.

Peak Oils not real? Keep reading fella. You know, on second thought it won't matter. Because someday in the near future, you will be sitting in some heated atrium in the middle of winter
  eating a caesar salad that traveled 3000 miles to get to your plate, and you will not believe your eyes, because the housing bubble has burst. Oil is $84 a barrell, and the stock market has tanked because the Chinese are playing fuck the Americans.

Oh yeah, does anyone remember a Tom Clancy book from the 1980s called Debt of Honour? The premise is that Japan had a major holding of US bonds. Its used this holding to basically create a stockmarket collapse and then attacked the US. Currently China is buying huge portions of US Debt. A county were everyh official is on the take and looking to our number one, and getting rich from it.

I think it only a matter of time before the US is attacked:

Scenario 1 : EMP Nuclear detonation over NE US. No energy, and probably none, for a very long time. In the middle of January would be a very good time.

Scenario 2 : Attack oil shipping lines and distribution within the US.

Scenario 3 : Attack US interests in Asia with a major countries assistance. Maybe Iran.

Vote for your favorite.

I'll just let him do the talking. This is an excerpt from October 10.

The Federal government has loaned the oil companies crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The SPR contained 700 million barrels of crude when the hurricanes hit. The US uses 20 million barrels of oil a day, of which we produce altogether about seven million barrels ourselves. It is unclear how much oil is coming out of it now, but the last time a president tapped the SPR (Clinton) one million barrels a day were released.

These actions have beaten down the price of crude oil on the various futures markets. At the same time, gasoline pump prices have leveled off from the refinery squeeze. I doubt that the motoring public is driving a whole lot less. The commutes haven't magically gotten any shorter out in Dallas and Denver over the past month. The national fleet of SUVs has not been changed out either.

What's happening, therefore is that we have entered an eerie hiatus. Some band-aids have been applied to our oil and natural gas supply injuries and the bleeding seems to have stopped. But the truth is that our energy supplies are badly compromised and at the worst time of the year -- just as we slide into the home heating season. Here in the northeast, we have barely had to turn on the furnaces yet, but that will change in a week or two.

In the background of this scene, the global oil production peak lurks -- meaning that there does not seem to be any surplus production capacity anywhere in the world, including OPEC's big gun, Saudi Arabia. So all we have here in America is a temporary appearance of normality. When the furnaces go on, the WalMart aisles will be empty. If there is any reduction in car trips, it will be because Americans are making fewer visits to the Big Box stores. There will also be fewer trips out to visit the model homes in the new subdivisions.

Another unpleasant truth about the situation is that the US public wants to pretend that everything is okay as much as its leaders do. The public is not so much being misled as demanding that its leaders in government, business, and the news media continue a game of make-believe -- that we can still run a cheap oil economy without cheap oil.

http://www.kunstler.com/

Why exactly would this be modded "Funny"? Peak Oil is terribly serious, and our lives will depend on how we get energy in the very near future. A bit of reading on the subject.

I highly recomend reading Jane Jacobs' Book. It warns of all the problems urban society is facing now, but was writen in the early 60's when all the modernist ideas that led to the problems were being implemented in north american cities. Iwould also recomend James Howard Kunstler's "Home From Nowhere" It is an explanation of why the suburb is the root of all societys problems. (see www.kunstler.com

'Pretty' awful, but not the worst I've seen. Good critique here.

(1) How many of the posts will wax poetical (or, alternately, rant and rave) about scramjets and rocket backpacks and automated slidewalks of the future;

(2) Will anyone bring up peak oil and how fucked we're gonna be?

Kunstler is always a good authority on this kind of thing (he believes that American cities are wretched wastelands devoted to the worship of the automobile). Here is an article in which he compares how Europeans walk a lot more than Americans because they have the kind of cities that make walking possible (and enjoyable). Big and Blue in the USA

Here is his website: http://www.kunstler.com/index.html His "Clusterfuck Nation" ongoing commentary is worthy of a bookmark, even from a right-winger like me.