american, l

The American Series, #3:

Much of the modern American lifestyle has been made possible by cheap, abundant energy; energy to heat and cool homes, to produce and transport goods and services over long distances, to power our recreational and conventional devices like televisions and coffee makers, to provide health care for just about any ailment from disinfecting a scratch to giving oxygen to those whose lungs can no longer do the work on their own. Cheap, abundant energy gives the human race an incredible advantage over the natural world and has allowed us to populate the land at immense rates and reconstruct the Earth in the image we desire.

But at what cost? How do we feel when the air conditioning fails and we’re succumbed to the outside elements slowly seeping through the cracks of the doors and windows? How do we deal when a machine fails to properly make a product or is no longer able to take us to the places where we’re most economically viable? How are we able to occupy our minds when our appliances break? How do we cope with the pain of a malady that we cannot treat?

We already experience these ills, for the most part in the short term, and we generally treat them with a huff of indignation, believing that life will be so much more of a headache without these privileges at our disposal. Who among us, especially the younger generation of Americans who have no clue what a lifestyle without cheap abundant energy is like, can imagine living in such a hell? Short of traveling to a third world country and living amongst them, how could we REALLY imagine this?

What could happen if this cheap abundant energy just suddenly DISAPPEARED?