The world is about to experience a polycrisis – where many different factors that have been approaching limits hit those limits all at once. People will probably be noticing the diesel shortage first, as they already are in the US. Diesel makes the world go round, but it’s about to become either extremely expensive or entirely unavailable. Countries that produce it will be banning exports, as Russia has already done, and the US will likely follow suit soon. Exports of other forms of energy will also be curtailed, meaning that fungibility will be a thing of the past. Those that have resources but cannot defend them will be looted by the powerful. The world is taking a giant step back, abandoning the rule of law in favour of the rule of raw power, where might makes right, but the mere illusion of might will rapidly be shattered.
Energy is the master resource, but the infrastructure for extracting, delivering, and refining it into useful products is being deliberately destroyed worldwide. Of the top 20 exporters, 9 are either offline or heavily constrained. Hormuz is almost entirely closed. The Gulf of Oman is blockaded. The entrance to the Red Sea is closed to Saudi exports. Insurance rates have skyrocketed due to the increased risk to shipping. The Saudi export pipeline has been destroyed. The war between Russia and Ukraine has become a race to destroy each others’ energy infrastructure. Refineries all over the world are experiencing strange ‘accidents’ that take them offline for months to years, or maybe permanently. Demand for diesel is causing a shortage of aviation fuel and bunker fuel for shipping, since the remaining refineries have to choose between these. All forms of goods transport are going to be badly affected.
The consequences of this have not yet been widely felt, but that era of more or less comfortable ignorance is about to come to an end. Energy essentially equals GDP, and the global energy supply has taken a giant step backwards, guaranteeing a global economic depression and shortly a global famine as well due to dual crises in diesel and fertiliser as a result of the war in the Gulf. Farmers who managed to plant this year may not be able to afford to harvest. Next year they may not be able to afford to plant at all. This will cost the lives of hundreds of millions of people at a minimum, and likely more.
As perceived risk rises, financial behaviour changes. The bond bond vigilanties are back with a vengeance. Far greater risk premiums are demanded in the global bond market, but this comes at a time when indebtedness is so extreme, due the end of a debt cycle, that higher interest rates are fatal. This is becoming increasingly evident in the US, as it desperately tries to hang on to hegemonic power, while control slips away. Despite the efforts of Treasury Secretary Bessent to manipulate rates downward by shifting to the short end of the curve, rates on the longer bonds continue to rise and are now firmly in the danger zone. The next step is an exploding debt scenario, especially given that the diesel crisis will crush economic growth. When the interest rate on debt exceeds the rate of growth, debt grows exponentially.
Europe is very highly exposed, due to its loss of both Russian gas and Gulf oil. It’s rapidly deindustrialising as a result, although it remains determined to make a bad situation worse as expensively as possible by contemplating a futile war with Russia. Much of Asia is exposed due to its hyper-dependence on Gulf energy and general lack of reserves. Australia and New Zealand are downstream of these economies, and so will be similarly affectec. China has reserves, but is already in the grip of depression led by its collapsed real estate market. Most of Asia (notably Japan, South Korea, and China) is dealing with demographic collapse. Much of the global south is dependent on imports of food and fertiliser, both of which will be sharply curtailed. The US is descending rapidly into incoherent fascism, and with an apparent desire to burn everything down if it can’t remain as the sole super-power.
The hyper-wealthy of the world are busy using the situation to maximise their own riches, while ignoring the consequences to their fellow human beings, even though those consequences will ultimately land at their own doors as well. It’s ironic that their guiding philosophies of ‘effective altruism’ and ‘extreme long termism’ depend on them having a long term, while their own actions are helping to foreclose on that possibility. Their philosophies involve balancing the projected needs of trillions of their own hypothetical, supposedly immortal, supposedly galaxy-hopping descendents against the needs of actual human beings in existence today. Actual humans lose under this worldview, and must be culled in order to preserve sufficient resources for the Star Trek future our delusional oligarchs assume is an option.
Deprioritization of immediate issues
Another concern is that longtermism may lead to deprioritizing more immediate issues, what Elizabeth C. Hupfer calls the Far-Future Priority Objection to longtermism. For example, some critics have argued that considering humanity’s future in terms of the next 10,000 or 10 million years might lead to downplaying [currently critical issues of survival]. Critics also worry that the most radical forms of strong longtermism could in theory justify atrocities in the name of attaining “astronomical” amounts of future value.
In the face of all of this, the best strategy people can pursue is to get out of debt where possible, upskill as much as possible, learn to live simply, scale down material expectations, get out from under as many dependencies as achievable, and above all build relationships of trust with neighbours. Community will matter enormously, as skills and resources can be shared, reducing the need for so many external inputs. Learning the extent of one’s local reality, in the absence of impirts, would be highly advisable, as would community asset mapping. Crunch times have happened before, since many aspects of human history are cyclical. This will be a bad one, given have far we have to fall from the peak abundant energy has allowed us to achieve, but it will not be the end of the world.
