> When the grid goes down and stays that way, when the coastal cities are flooded and the flyover towns all Lyttonised, when we’ve exhausted the world’s arable land (about thirty years from now, last I heard) and civilization itself begins to collapse (twenty); we’ll be out there with our Molotov cocktails and our boards-with-the-nails-through-‘em. It’s how societies collapse.<p>It's not how societies collapse though. Collapse takes a long time and it's a slow process. We might already be in it in much of the developed world. Working age population sizes are already beginning to come down and I don't know of a historical example of a society that continued to grow while working age population shrunk.<p>I guess the anger that a lot of people have around climate change is normal, but what do you expect to happen? You can't keep fitting more and more people on a planet the size of Earth and expect to increase energy consumption forever. Even with the most optimistic forecasts about energy storage a world that reduces CO2 emissions to minimize global warming is a world where people are using a lot less energy. That means less vacations, less stuff, less high end services.