This month’s Museletter from Richard Heinberg at the Post Carbon Institute provides a valuable synopsis of where China and the US are at in avoiding an increasingly inevitable societal collapse,

Increasingly I am forced to conclude that the object of the game that world leaders are actually playing is not to avoid collapse; it’s simply to postpone it a while so as to be the last nation to go down, so yours can have the chance to pick the others’ carcasses before it meets the same fate.

I’ve reached a similar opinion after watching how both nations have responded to the first major round of economic problems to come. Heinberg continues,

For these two nations, avoiding collapse would require solving a range of enormous problems, of which at least four are non-negotiable: climate change; peak fossil fuels (in effect, stagnating and, soon, declining energy supplies); the inherent instability of growth-based financial systems; and the vulnerability of food systems to factors like fresh water scarcity and soil erosion (in addition to global warming and fuel scarcity). If they fail to address any one of these, societal collapse is inevitable—in a few decades certainly, but perhaps in just the next few years.

After reading through the rest of the write-up, I’m wondering if there is any hope for civilization (despite the arguments for or against maintaining it). And if we can agree that the people in charge don’t have our resilience in mind, when do we completely disconnect from the system?