I let myself get scared a little, as I should with any good peak oil story, and then went looking for an Achilles' Heel. "Some might also wonder why a shortage

I let myself get scared a little, as I should with any good peak oil story, and then went looking for an Achilles' Heel. "Some might also wonder why a shortage of oil should automatically trigger a collapse. It turns out that, in an industrialized economy, a drop in oil consumption precipitates a proportional drop in overall economic activity. Oil is the feedstock used to make the vast majority of transportation fuels -- which are used to move products and deliver services throughout the economy. In the US in particular, there is a very strong correlation between GDP and motor vehicle miles traveled. Thus, the US economy can be said to run on oil, in a rather direct and immediate way: less oil implies a smaller economy. At what point does the economy shrink so much that it can no longer meet its own maintenance requirements? In order to continue functioning, all sorts of infrastructure, plant and equipment must be maintained and replaced in a timely manner, or it stops functioning. Once that point is reached, economic activity becomes constrained not just by the availability of transportation fuels, but also by the availability of serviceable equipment. At some point the economy shrinks so much as to invalidate the financial assumptions on which it is based, making it impossible to continue importing oil on credit. Once that point is reached, the amount of transportation fuels available is no longer limited just by the availability of oil, but also constrained by the inability to finance oil imports." This is the part which attempts to convince the reader that a simple recession/stagnation cannot occur. Unfortunately, it vastly underestimates our resourcefulness and runs on the fallacy of the USA only ever being capable of transportation with petroleum, or of a collapse so swift and sudden(from full consumption to zero in a matter of months; an unlikely event, between price hikes, austerity measures, the application of strategic reserves, opening of existing private stocks, etc.) that no response can be made. If it ever becomes too costly to run petroleum-based freighters, we can still revive coal and sail technology. That alone will ensure the survival of ocean-bound transportation(and hence a lot of import-export dependencies). Overland, goods in the USA are transported through the most cost-effective freight system in the world; trucks are "last mile" haulers in most situations. Our existing rail and electric systems can revert to coal for some time to come, although nobody likes the ecological costs involved in coal. And this even leaves open the possibility of refrigerated transit, just not necessarily at present-day schedules. So the remaining energy problems, as I see them, are in petro-agriculture dependency and infrastructure(primarily in housing stock). Difficult? Yes. Impossible? No. People will die as a result of pretty much any peak oil scenario. A full collapse, though, requires both an overnight cratering of production, and an awful lot of faith in people to do exactly the wrong things.