Prosper!. Chris Martenson
It often means going against the herd, which takes discipline, courage, and a thick skin. Most people will wait until the last minute once the crisis has arrived, which is far too late to properly prepare.
For example, during the writing of this book in early summer 2015, the panicked people of Greece started lining up at ATMs to withdraw their money only after the country’s banking system had shut down. The mass’s magical thinking that “Everything will somehow work out” left them flat-footed when things didn’t work out. In contrast, prudent minds that had been paying attention removed their funds much earlier, having heeded the parade of warning signs over the prior few years.
The vast majority of people out there, just like the good citizens of Greece, will wait until a crisis strikes before allowing the reality of present circumstances to penetrate their mental defenses. It’s simply how humans are wired.
This is why a good portion of this book is dedicated not just to physical action, but to the emotional and psychological preparation necessary to persevere and even thrive amidst turbulent times.
If you’ve read this far, we can already tell you’re the kind of person uncomfortable leaving the future up to fate alone. If you’re ready to start shaping your destiny, this book is for you.
Resilience is not something you acquire and are done with; it’s a life-long process of refinement and improvement. Done the right way, becoming resilient is incredibly worthwhile and rewarding. And if you set out on this path, we guarantee you’ll be vastly more prepared and prosperous in the coming decades than those who ignore the signs of coming change.
Preparing for this new future, whatever it ultimately may be, is simultaneously the greatest challenge and opportunity of our lifetimes. We say this as fellow pilgrims on the journey who happen to have gotten started a few years ago and can therefore be your guides. As concerned as we are about the multiplying risks in the world, we’re equally excited by the better models for living we see emerging, ones we’re helping to create with our direct participation.
It’s time for action. To safeguard your future. To leave a better tomorrow to those you care about. To live more authentically and, most important, to find greater happiness.
It’s time to Prosper!
In community, your authors:
Before we get into the particulars of becoming more resilient, we’d like to share with you the data that explains why many people are increasingly motivated to action.
The short version is that virtually everything we take for granted is on an unsustainable trajectory. Our economic model demands perpetual growth – indefinitely. Exponentially increasing levels of debt, overuse of ecosystems, and ever-accelerating depletion of fossil fuels are just a few of the many examples of practices that cannot continue forever.
Stating the obvious: anything that can’t go on forever, won’t.
Now, before you quickly dismiss us as dyed-in-the-wool pessimists, allow us to step through the data that supports our views. Even if you’re already well-versed in this material, you may find this re-grounding in the data as motivation to get busy on your path towards resilience.
Your authors are data driven people, and we track a lot of it very closely through the work at our website, PeakProsperity.com. What sets us apart from most commentators, analysts and observers is that we dig deep into what we call the Three Es—the Economy, Energy and the Environment - and connect them all into a single, simple, and coherent framework.
When new data emerges, we adjust our views accordingly. But with the facts available to us today, this is the story we have to tell.
ENERGY
It all begins with energy. You are so completely enveloped within the comforting embrace of surplus energy that it probably escapes your notice and proper appreciation. As water is to a fish, so energy is to you.
Take a moment and glance at the things around you. Walls and ceilings, lights, appliances, furniture and clothing. There are metals, plastics and fabrics galore all around you.
Think about where you drove yesterday. How far will you travel over the next month? Where are you headed later today?
Each and every one of the things you can see, touch or do in life got there or is made possible because of energy. Fossil fuel energy mainly—but even more specifically, because of oil. Ninety-five percent of everything that moves from point A to point B in our globalized, just-in-time economy does so because of liquid fuels derived from petroleum. This means that when you scanned your surroundings, virtually everything your eyes saw required oil to get there.
Widening beyond what you can see, at this very moment there are massive traffic jams on hundreds of highways in hundreds of cities across the globe. Twenty-four hours a day. Three hundred sixty-five days a year, during every hour of every day, there are millions of cars just sitting there, stuck in massive traffic jams.
The price of oil is sensitively dependent on whether we are consuming slightly more than we are producing (which causes the price to rise), or if we’re consuming slightly less than we are producing (resulting in a price decline). But prices can distract you from the truth about oil, which is that we are constantly 24×7×365 burning it up in greater and greater amounts with every passing year.
Energy is also critically important because it’s tightly linked to economic growth, which is revered and sought by every nation on the planet. Everybody wants growth, especially more economic growth, which means continuously having more things produced and sold this year than last.
But this slavish fixation on economic growth has led us to overlook the reality that, for every additional 1% increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), electricity usage increases by roughly 0.5% and oil use increases by roughly 0.25%. So, it’s as simple as this: Growing an economy requires the consumption of energy to grow.
But this is clearly not a reasonable demand to make of a finite planet. While the demand for economic growth is unlimited, there’s a limited amount oil in the ground. The same is true for other fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.
Centering just on oil, because the world remains so tremendously dependent on it, there are only two things you need to know.
First, the easy stuff is all gone. If there were easy stuff left we would not be drilling in ultra-deep waters, fracking at enormous expense, and boiling tar residue off of Canadian sand. Getting oil out of the ground is undeniably and obviously getting harder and more expensive as time goes on.
Second, there are no viable replacements for cheap oil anywhere on the horizon, at least not at the scales required *. We have no plan B in place for how we are going to transition off of oil. [*Note: the projected contributions from biofuels and electric vehicles are so tiny compared to oil’s stronghold on the transportation sector that they can be all but ignored at the moment.]
So as oil depletes, it becomes more expensive to extract every year, and we have no substitutes for it. Every year those two concepts become just a little bit more obvious.
The insidious part of this story is buried in the ‘more expensive to extract’ statement. Putting aside the additional money involved for a moment, what that really means is that we have to expend more energy to just get the same amount of energy out of the ground.
It takes energy to get energy, and we run both our economy and society on the surplus energy left over after all the energy used to find, extract, refine and distribute that energy has been subtracted.
Imagine for a moment that we were living