How Complex Is Your Personal Supply Chain?

David Trammel's picture

Interesting article which puts most of what we know here together

"How Vulnerable Is Your Personal Supply Chain?"

"How vulnerable is your personal supply chain? For the average American, the answer is: very. Americans consider abundance and ready availability as birthrights so basic they’re like the air we breathe. The idea that shelves could become bare and stay bare is incomprehensible. yet that is the world we’re entering, for a number of complex reasons.

One is that the world added not just another billion humans (now 7.9 billion), but one billion middle-class consumers, consumers who use about 100 times more energy per person than poor people.These additional billion middle-class consumers doubled the number of high-energy consuming humans in a few decades, and this enormous expansion of demand has consumed all the easy-to-extract resources of the planet. There are no cheap, easy-to-extract resources left; all that’s left is expensive to reach, extract, transport, etc., and since energy is the master resource, as its cost rises, so does the cost of literally everything that depends on energy."