YYMV depending on where you are on the planet. The price of corn has already doubled in the last couple years, and as agribusiness fuel and chemical costs rise with that of imported oil, it will keep on rising.
If you live in an undeveloping part of the world, malnourished already... Choice #1: clasp your hands behind your head, bend down to put your nose between your knees, and kiss your ass good by.
Then, if you live in a rich part, like the USA, and foreign oil is no longer available, who getsta decide how to share out the remaining 40% that is domestically produced? If gas/diesel supplies are shifted away from agribusiness to the great power centers to maintain the lifestyles of the elite, then the next harvest will be lower.
Food prices will rise faster than food stamp allotments. The good news is that people will shift away from junkfood twards lower cost locally grown veggies. The bad news is that they will loose fat, and dissolved in that fat are deposits of environmental contaminants. We can expect the cancer rate to skyrocket along with miscarriages, premies, and congenital deformities. We can also expect the lifestyle change to have psychological effects, and this could result in civil unrest.
They have been mad as hell for a long time; they mite start dragging the bastards out to be shot.
Which will only add to the chaos. The supply of batteries, fan belts, anti-freeze, lubricants, components, etc to agribusiness will be interrupted and production will drop off dramatically. "TEOTWAWKI"? in which case, if you are in the wrong place, your only choice is, as above, #1.
Perhaps 1% of the population now lives in a remote rural area with the means to grow enough food entirely on local energy supplies. I dont know if they will have the farmers who know how to do it. I expect that there will be enough gardeners to show everyone how to work with hand tools to grow enough veggies to get thru the first year while the local farmers figure it out.
A *LOT* will depend on how fast that descent you speak of is. The rise to Hubbards peak followed a smooth bell curve. The descent wont. As the price of oil rises, greed will set in with violent attempts to steal and take over supply sources. The violence will damage infrastructure reducing supply further, which will drive the price higher which will drive the greed....
The resulting crash will make the 1929 Black Friday debacle look like a fender bender. The resulting global depression will look apocalyptic.
I read of a breakthru in solar panels. I hope it comes online in time. I've had solar panels since 1982, and heard of 'breakthrus' several times that never panned out. It was always fool's gold. But even without a dramatic rise in wind or solar supply, rational political leadership could keep a lid on it while we work out how to live with higher fuel prices.
But we dont *have* rational political leadership do we? As a result, the only vote that matters is that which you make with your feet. Or a U-haul, to some region that will be better able to cope with the dissolution of the Untied States of Denial. The two places that folks are moving to already, as seen in the *continued* rise in real estate prices, are the Arkansas Ozarks and Alaska.
If you can handle cold wet weather consider Alaska, altho gardening to produce enough to get the community thru the winter may be a challenge. With the Ozarks, you can, as I have, take some greens right thru the winter, and be able to harvest root crops covered with mulch all winter long. I also went thru the entire 8 weeks (rather than 8 months) of really cold weather on one cord of firewood.
People seem to have figured this out, and are moving in at a prodigeous rate; starter castles & McMansions are going up all along the paved roads. They seem to be rich, but they may also be reichtard crazies. Course, that may be a problem anywhere. Wallace, in his anthro classic "Culture & Personality" noted that when a system is on the skids, and people's coping skills no longer work, they engage in "magical thinking" (which he coined). Thus all the 'wiccans' doing tarot or astrology, and all the fundies speaking of "The Rapture". Different forms of kidssing your ass goodbye.
But eventually, months or years ahead, we'll figure it out. The Amish grow food with draft animals, some of which are their own kids. Each agribusiness operator grows enough to feed 95-100 people. Each Amish about 20-25. Just adding 12 volt headlites to horsedrawn equipment so you can run 24/7 at peak harvest would move that more twards 30. But even a well run organic operation would max at 50 people per farm worker. Course, by then, half the global population would have starved, so it will be sustainable.
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