Thread by @JeffAndDonkeys

Many people see industrial civilization grinding to a halt during current lifetimes. I do.
I'm going to tell you how I think it goes down.
This is pure speculation. There exist zero facts about the future. It will be what it is.
If you disagree, write your own thread. Not here.

2. Most of the conversation about future failings are based on degrees C of temperature increases. They are meaningful and real, but I don't see industrial failure as linked to them.
I choose to qualify "civilization" with "industrial" because what we call civilization is

3. fully dependent on high energy industry.
Civilization, whatever that means (which is widely disputed) could be arranged other ways. The great civilizations of Central and South America (as now named) didn't even have wheeled vehicles nor work animals. 100% human food energy.

4. What I think brings it to a halt will be the loss of high energy fuel delivery systems.
The weak point is not the amount of oil, the amount of gas, the amount of coal.
The weak point is the grid and pipelines. Without the grid, fuel processing and transportation stops.

5. And the weakest point in the grid is the human support staff. The wetware.
There is no possibility that we are in our last pandemic.
None whatsoever.
Eight billion of us.
Hundreds of thousands, Hell maybe millions, of us fly from continent to continent every week.

6. Many people are outraged, but the grim fact is that Covid is only a little bit deadlier than cars, and we've ignored the death toll from cars since the beginning.
And we're ignoring Covid, and so far we're still out-breeding it.
We get something as virulent as Covid and even

7. a 25% mortality rate, and the machine stops. Worldwide.
There were places in Europe where plague mortalities were in the 90%'s.
I personally think that's the most likely, coz - I mean, look at us. 99+% of all the land empty industrial ag desert, and 99+% of eye people stacked

8. The people, not eye people - are stacked up on top of each other in stadia which seat 90,000. We go to the grocery store with all the people within a fifty mile wide circle, same at the office. We're a textbook example of pandemic prone. All that's missing is the bug. Build it

9. And they will come.
To me the next most likely is guerilla warfare.
There are a fair number of countries in the world where any real grid is a dim memory, because the chronic guerilla warfare takes it out.
Here in the US we've already got assholes attacking the grid. News.

10. Without electricity we can't run pipelines. We can't pump gas. We can't even sell groceries if the store is full.
Admittedly, there are a lot of subunits in the grid, but - we're losing them now, faster than we can build them back. Fires, floods, and storms are winning.

11. All it took was "Oops!" to make this.
A dark spot almost as big as the Gulf of Mexico, right where lots of people live.
Took a few days to fix.
There has never before been a civilization with such potential for single points of failure to stop the whole world.
Never before.

12. We're already in a low level guerrilla war in the United States, and its proponents are still ginning it up, and the oligarchy has declared this to be Free Speech. When people talk about wiping out Woke, they're not talking about philosophy. They're talking about body counts.

13. If the flow of fuel stops, everything stops. This was the foundation of my #slowdown campaign - a walking pace culture has no central point of failure. That's why we lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
You can't bomb a few bridges and power stations and be done. Gotta killemall.

14. If 85% of the national grid went down and stayed down, people would be dying of thirst in a week.
Within four days most of the electric life support patients nationwide would be dead.
The whole thing, for all its glorious technocracy, is kept running by men and women in

15. Pickup trucks and in big buildings where nobody but we few ever go.
That's why a pandemic won't do it. Yes, it's all automatic, but it's also constantly, since the day it was turned on breaking and being fixed and running on redundancy. I was one the people who keep

16. The twentieth, and now the 21st, century running.
It's not magic. There is a huge army keeping it going. That's why pandemic is the biggest risk. Take out the maintenance army it dies. Month, maybe less. Maybe only days.
Remember when Covid got here?
I don't know its real

17. Mortality rate, I know it killed a dear friend of mine who was younger than me, but still it's down in the single digits at worst, and Jim was nursing a bad heart. Covid killed him, but - he couldn't bring a full healthy body to bear against it, thus it always is.

18. Most of the United States can't produce its own food, can't source its own food within a week's walk most of the time. That's silly. Just silly. Cheap food via diesel fuel is what my daddy called penny wise and pound foolish.

21. When I turned 21, Kansas City was still surrounded with truck farms and got the big majority of its fruits and vegetables from close enough that they could have been delivered via horse wagon.
Today all of those are corn or soybean deserts, miles long, covering every inch

22. From the river to the bluff, and if the electric goes out we'll have mass starvation if we're not lucky. You're talking five million people living on ground cornmeal because field corn is the only thing we grow, and we grow it to feed to our cows and our cars.

23. No guarantees on any of this, it's all just my opinion.
I spent my working life, beginning in 1969, in the national public switched telephone network. When the Internet came along I was there fixing it. What we live in is a system, it has characteristics which seem common to