It doesn’t matter where in America you live; it doesn’t matter what your job is. Let’s imagine, for an instant, that tomorrow you wake up and the nation has entered a Post-Carbon Era.
t doesn’t matter why it happened, at this point – all you know is that it did happen. It may have been another terrorist attack with low-yield dirty nuclear bombs in key cities. It may have been long-range, high-payload strategic ICBMs from Russia after Putin finally popped off. It may have been that the Saudis and Iranians and everyone in the Gulf just got sick and tired of our imperialist meddling and cut off the flow of oil. It may be that China got tired of holding all our worthless IOUs and called them in at once, causing our entire economy to melt down.
Whatever the cause, the effect is the same: lots of General Unhappiness in the states.
Having said all that, what does the state of a PCE actually comprise? What events will come to pass before we can truly say, "Yes, okay, now we are living in the Post Carbon Era?"
Below are some rough guidelines, any of which taken alone would be cause for general societal alarm, but two or more of which will suffice to act as an operational definition of our theoretical Post Carbon Era:
• Interruption or breakdown of federal services (banks, police, fire, hospitals, jails, sewers, power generation)
• supply chain disruptions (food and consumer goods)
• prohibitively expensive energy price (oil, gasoline, natural gas, diesel, bunker fuel)
• economic difficulty (extreme currency deflation or collapse / skyrocketing unemployment)
• the erosion of the basic social order (i.e. nobody going to work, rioting and looting, etc)
Basically, to envision the PCE, one must only think of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, multiply that effect by 2 or 3, and broaden it to a national scale.