Emergency Preparedness for Worldwide Crises

By Matthew Stein
Published on September 13, 2012
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If you’re worried about global crises such as peak oil, the book “When Disaster Strikes,” by Matthew Stein, will help you map out a plan for emergency preparedness. Learn what you need to have on hand and what skills you should acquire to be ready for the worst. 
If you’re worried about global crises such as peak oil, the book “When Disaster Strikes,” by Matthew Stein, will help you map out a plan for emergency preparedness. Learn what you need to have on hand and what skills you should acquire to be ready for the worst. 
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The world’s top scientists believe that our planet’s climate is changing at an accelerating pace, that these changes are caused by humankind, and will have increasingly severe consequences for our world.
The world’s top scientists believe that our planet’s climate is changing at an accelerating pace, that these changes are caused by humankind, and will have increasingly severe consequences for our world.

In his book When Disaster Strikes (Chelsea Green, 2011), author Matthew Stein outlines emergency preparedness strategies for a number of potential global catastrophes. Even if you don’t worry about the potential effects of climate change or peak oil, having more knowledge about how to protect your loved ones in the case of an emergency will be useful information.

You can purchase this book from the MOTHER EARTH NEWS store: When Disaster Strikes.

I suggest that you consider the following six trends that appear to be combining to form the perfect storm for global catastrophe, each of which is a potential civilization buster in its own right, if left unchecked. You may not agree with the scientific foundation for all of these trends, and it may turn out that scientists’ concerns about one or more of these trends are unfounded, but is it not prudent to plan for the potential that one or more of these trends might significantly damage or disrupt the complex global systems that we rely upon to keep ourselves comfortably fed, clothed, and sheltered? This is the ultimate in emergency preparedness.

1. Peak Oil

Our global economy and culture are built largely upon a reliance on cheap oil. From the cars we drive, to the jets we fly, to the buildings we live in, to the food we eat, to the clothes we wear–almost everything that encompasses the fabric of our modern life is either powered by oil, built from oil, or made/grown via machines powered by oil. When the price of oil rose above $140 a barrel in 2008, the world’s economy went into a tailspin — collapsing local economies, reducing consumption, and bringing the price of oil back down to a fraction of what it had been just a few months earlier. Global output of traditional crude oil peaked around 2005 to 2006 and is currently declining. Expensive alternative oil and oil-equivalent sources, like tar sands, deep ocean oil wells, and biofuels have taken up the slack for the time being, but these are limited resources and their utilization is not growing as quickly as necessary to fill in the gap caused by the shrinking output from the world’s mature oil fields. In 2008 the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated the decline of output from the world’s mature oil fields at a rate of 9.1 percent annually, with a drop to “only” 6.4 percent if huge capital investments are made to implement “enhanced oil recovery” technologies on a massive scale.  

Without developing energy alternatives at warp speed, or discovering and developing an entire Saudi Arabia’s worth of oil every few years from now until eternity (an impossible fantasy), our world will be in a heap of trouble if and when the economy starts to pop back and supply once again falls short of demand, resulting in more oil price spikes followed by another round of financial declines (as of the fall of 2011, there are distinct signs that this is starting to occur). Even if the global economy never returns to its pre-2008 levels, we will still be in trouble as declining supplies are projected to fall short of the current demand in this rather depressed economy.

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