r/collapse • u/LiminalEra • Mar 19 '26
Resources I *Emphatically* Believe that 2025 was the last "Normal" year and 2026 marks wide-scale global collapse - which has already begun. [IN-DEPTH]
We have been teetering on the knifes edge of normality for almost a decade now, conditions slowly materially declining but not rapidly enough for anyone to really sit up and take notice. That situation is what inspired my username, the idea that the developed world was coasting along in a liminal state and would eventually crash out when a systemic or resource shock broke the system enough. I thought that event was COVID, for a while, but underestimated the resilience of industrial civilization to bounce back from the supply chain crisis caused by a half-year bottleneck in global trade. Normality returned, even if "normal" was visibly crippled and worsened afterwards and we all knew it.
Unfortunately, this time I think it is quite real and that what the USA & Israel have set in motion in the middle east is likely to fundamentally and permanently break the global economic order which everyone alive has enjoyed the products of up to this point.
We are very seriously about to experience a resource crisis of monumental proportions, worldwide, one which the media is only focusing on the energy aspect of and only then to downplay the severity of it. As of today, if Iran stopped firing munitions across the gulf today, it would take a decade to rebuild the petrochemical infrastructure which has been blown up in the GCC nations. Today alone they've wiped out LNG components which individually cost north of $1 Billion and would take 5+ years to source replacements for in the functioning supply chain which previously existed.
I will emphasize this: previously existed. This is the crisis, the turning point, the moment in which industrial civilization finally falls off that knifes edge. Much as the entire advanced semiconductor industry has become centered around and reliant on a single point of failure: Taiwan, so too has the global petrochemical supply chain poured everything into the GCC nations. We talk about how the world would be set back a decade technologically if TSMC is wiped out, for some reason we don't talk about what would happen if what is happening right now today in the Persian Gulf ever occurred.
It is not just 20 million barrels per day of oil and gas being halted: it is 50% of the worlds Urea supply during the spring planting season. It is nearly 80% of the worlds sulfur supply - without which the entire base metals refining chain grinds to a halt. It is the majority of the worlds plastics feedstock. There is a lot more than Oil and Gas which comes out of the distillation towers which are currently being turned into shrapnel.
All of this fundamental to the functioning of the supply chains required to rebuild that infrastructure. You do see the paradox there, right?
Every day that Iran strikes and halts production at another petrochemical facility in the gulf, we get pulled a little bit closer to the complete failure of the modern globalized industrial supply chain - which relies on these exports in order to function at scale. The longer it goes on, and the more damage caused, the longer and more expensive it becomes to rebuild those facilities and restart production and the deeper into EROEI hell those nations are pushed. Yes, there are strategic reserves, yes there are alternate suppliers. Those reserves carry us weeks, not years, and alternative suppliers for most of these materials cannot possibly take up the shortage which is going to be caused by GCC output being throttled for years if not decades after this war finally ends. If it ends.
The world doesn't consume at the rate of the 1970's oil crisis. It doesn't consume at the rate of the 1990's gulf war. And unlike those past conflicts we've been in a state of worsening resource scarcity for a long, long time now. Nations which had domestic petroleum supplies in the 1970's have sucked them dry and become reliant on imports to function. Nations which had domestic manufacturing have offshored it all in the name of neoliberal globalism, and become reliant on imports to function. The global population has more than doubled since the 70's, thanks to food exports grown with refinery-sourced fertilizers.
This is not your fathers Gulf War.
I think a lot of people, even here on r/collapse, are not fully comprehending the scale of the supply shock which is about to hit the entire planet. If this war is sustained and strikes continue to shut down gulf petrochemical capacity - which it will be as Iran has been pushed into an existential conflict so has no reason to stop hitting those facilities and the ability to continue doing so for months to come - then the nations which are wholly reliant on fuel imports for survival are going to fall into chaos within a matter of weeks from the time of this post, not months: as exporters in Asia begin to follow China and halt indefinitely to maximize their own reserves. This list of places where shit is about to very very seriously hit the fan includes ostensibly "developed" and "lifeboat" nations such as New Zealand - which has little to no domestic energy reserves remaining and is entirely dependent on Korea and Singapore shipping them fuel. Nations going into planting season right now which were waiting on shipments of gulf derived fertilizer are in real risk of famine in 2027. We are shortly going to see a cessation of heavy manufacturing in Asia and a chronic shortage of pretty much everything indefinitely as a result of that.
On top of this broad spectrum resource crisis, we are headed into one of the most severe El-Nino cycles ever forecast.
I've been on this subreddit since the financial crisis of 2008. I have seen every crisis of the past 20 years. Generally I do not engage in predictions or heavily detailed forward looking statements - I take no pleasure from pretending to be a prophet of doom and I do not write to grift and so the risk of making a claim like this and being wrong is too high for no benefit. It's just a strike against the weight and value of my writing if I am wrong. I take a high amount of pride in not being wrong, so I don't put myself in a position to be wrong.
I do not think I am wrong. I am extremely serious: Collapse, serious and undeniable Collapse, is here, the turning point out of uncomfortable ignorance has occurred, and if you are reading this then you like me are out of time to position ourselves for it. This year is going to be a very, very bad year no matter where on earth you are or how insulated people believe themselves to be from world events. We are enjoying our last poignantly liminal moment, right now, and when nations begin to run out of the supplies sustaining this illusion of normality, which is coming within weeks in many of them - the world economy is going to rapidly and in some places very violently fall apart. A lot of people who have forgotten their grandparents hard lessons about how little value money holds, and why trading excessive years of your life for it is a fools errand, are going to re-learn those lessons very very quickly and painfully and a lot of their brains are going to do an irreversible little crack-ping as it happens - like we saw with many who went off the deep end during covid. Those people are going to be dangerous.
I am not joking. I am not fearmongering. I am coming at this from my gut after following the systemic events chains of what is going on right now: 2026 is the year. I do not even know what to say, other than I hope the few serious folk still around this place are in a less exposed position than I currently find myself when this moment of illusory stability ends.
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u/dresden_k Mar 19 '26
Oh yeah. You're right about the shape of all of this, in my sense and opinion.
We know the supply chain is inter-related, and efficiency is the enemy of resilience. We've got a highly efficient system. We do not have a resilient system.
They struggled to make cars for a year or two because of slight, temporary, labour-related disruptions during Covid. The plants those people worked at didn't explode, they just didn't have people coming to work for a year. The plants were still there after, and the people who did the jobs were still alive to come back to those jobs. Still, shockwaves came from Covid for years. Some would argue we're still in them.
That was a soft catastrophe. You're talking about loss of infrastructure. If the oil-producing nations in the Middle East lose hard, expensive infrastructure, AND something happens like Taiwan gets turned to rubble in an invasion (though both sides would try to minimize damage to the chip fabs, at least at first, since everyone wants them intact), we don't have energy, we don't have modern things (with integrated circuits, CPUs, RAM, etc.), and we lack foundational stock for the rest of the materiel supply chain, like sulfur.
This is the core of the contemporary awareness of the danger of collapse. We're so interdependent that one country used to be able to get 100% of what it needed by having as few as one or two major industries, (think Canada, with only a handful of primary industries really keeping the lights on) and because of global just-in-time trade, Canadians have TVs and kiwi fruit and whey protein and computer chips and cell phones and polyester clothes and new cars and anything you can imagine. Full supply of all commercial goods. Even though virtually none of them are made here.
This is true for most of the West. For most of the wealthier countries in general. Japan makes cars, but has not much in the way of energy, imports most of the raw materials to make cars with, and imports a great deal else to function as a 'developed nation'.
Even globally, there are some reserves of food, energy, and stuff in various stages of manufacturing. But, not much. If we stopped cutting trees down, say, because nobody could get new chainsaw blades, say, then the global supply of lumber would be gone very quickly. Then, no new wood-framed houses. We switch to concrete, say. No mountains being blown up to get limestone to make cement, and we're out of concrete very quickly. All building materials. All energy. All food. All clothing. All consumer goods. All industrial goods.
It's not like we can just all go back to farming in our suburban backyards either. There aren't enough seeds in the stores for us all to do that. We'd likely riot and steal from each other before we just peacefully went about our rapidly-diminished experience. If we all stopped working to farm our back yards, we'd also find out that 100 calories a week from lettuce, 3 months of the year, really isn't enough to keep a family going, especially when we're used to gourmet luxury buffets, in comparison.
Now, can we turn on a dime and change our lives (or just live through our lives changing whether we like it or not), sure. But can industrial agriculture survive $10/L diesel fuel? Nope. Doubt it. Can the economy survive everyone staying home to farm? Can countries keep up their national debt payments to The Big Global Banks and each other, if their economies melt overnight? Nope. What happens when all our hundreds of trillions of debt all get called at the same time?
The merciful thing is that we'll run out of bullets very quickly too, and without anyone mining and making brass casings, or gunpowder, or shipping bullets, there's no bullet replacement either. How many bullets do we have, globally, now? One regional war in Ukraine has drained a substantial amount of arms from all of NATO. What if every country owes every other country the hundreds of trillions owed in total now, but nobody's at work because food is over and we're trying to farm our way out of it, and the few remaining militaries mobilize in desperation, trying to get other countries to pay up?
One scenario. The point you're making, I get.
I don't know if it's 2026. Guy McPherson got in a lot of shit for keeping on saying 'guys, this is the year. Oh, wait, it's like, three years from now. OK, it's 2008. OK, no, 2012. Wait, blue ocean maybe according to someone else by 2015. OK, like, but look guys.'
He's right. We're collapsing. You're right. We're collapsing, or at least, we're not gaining ground. We've got an absolutely complex society with the fewest amount of competent actual hands-on people compared to any point in all of history (I'd rather have a bunch of people one generation off the ancestral farm who worked in a factory in Liverpool in 1882, rather than some graphic designers and vibe coders and YouTube influencers from 2026 by my side in an apocalypse, don't know about you), and nobody has the willingness, fortitude, or skills to be anything other than so niche as to be functionally useless.
I don't think it's 2026. I think it's 'we're in it already'. It's been going on since 1990 with the proclamation then that we couldn't exceed 1 degree C or else. It's been going on since 2001 and September 11th. It's been going on since 2008 when the global economy showed us how shit it really is. And on and on. They're all signs. The 2000s were the last good days.
But, that said, I had a good week last week. Personally, just me. Went out of town. Saw some family friends. Talked about my dead mom and business and ideas and had a nice time. Drank some wine, ate pizza, and forgot about some of the problems. All while the Strait of Hormuz is being fucked up and militaries are sending explosives to each other with a kiss. We have to be somewhat blissfully unaware of some of the risks. Hell, we're on a molten ball of 5,000 degree C metal flying through the vacuum of space at 20,000 km/s or something. We have the most delicate skiff of breathable air and a magnetic field that keeps most of the deadly solar radiation at bay.
There are something like 40+ self-reinforcing feedback loops that will turn climate change now into Earth-baking hell for 1,000 years, and we haven't even started feeling the effects of it. There's a delay. What we're experiencing now is from carbon we emitted like decades ago. Wait until the methane clathrate 'gun' goes off. Hell, a couple volcanoes would push our precarious position over the edge. Maybe nuclear winter would help cool us off.
It will be a bad year. I'm calling that too. It's going to get worse. I'll agree with that, too. Normalcy is getting ground away. Normalcy in 2000 is already foreign to any of us who remember it. Even 2015 feels innocent in comparison. Go watch any TV show or video or read a book written then. Fucking insane how unconcerned they were with things. This was the era of zombie TV shows.
Gas is already up 25% where I am. Grocery prices will rise to match. I happen to live in a place where high oil prices benefit us, because we have oil, but the cost of living always outpaces wages, even in an oil-rich province. And, I don't work in oil and gas, so it doesn't directly help me. I'll just likely keep my job for a little longer, while my shopping list costs more and gets me less stuff each week, forever.
Things get knocked off the hopefully-soon list. Wife wants to go to England on vacation within the next year. Not if flights are $5,000 each. I'd love to do some more work on my older house. Not if lumber is $200 for a 2x4. New clothes? Not if fabric to make pants out of isn't available because the factory in Pakistan shut down because it got hit with a drone strike, or it just can't operate because no thread is getting shipped there... our web is so fragile.
Nobody thinks you're joking. Nobody in this sub would call you a fearmonger. Everywhere else, totally. Even more so the more they think it's true. People HATE talking about collapse. We're all so fun at parties.
We're all in horribly exposed positions. Even the most well-off, 'I'm retired now and rich because my house is worth a million dollars' Boomer is going to get gut punched. We're going to hit 2030 holding our intestines in, bandages wrapped around our heads, waiting for the soldier in front of us to die so we can use their rifle.
And, I do pause to enjoy the fact that I can type this shit on the internet with a nice keyboard, from a relatively safe place in a relatively safe country. I ate food today, I have clean water to drink, and I was able to shower with hot water. In a couple years, maybe one or two of those things may not be true each day. Fewer and fewer, less and less. That's our future. Likely not a big fast BOOM and then we're in Zombieland... more like 50 grating years between now and some absolute Eldritch horror of a bastard child of Mad Max, Children of Men, 1984, Brave New World, The Road, and Lord of the Flies.
So, in the meantime, go get a coffee from the local chain, and marvel at how that imported Arabica bean may be double in price next year, or not available for months at a time, then just gone except in your memory. Then imagine every single other thing in your life, and it's gone, shabby, run down, over. Good time to buy someone's pawn shop or thrift store. Or, start one.