Why 2030 Matters So Much for the USA

Or, some notes on Boom Boom Geopolitics

The importance of the year 2030 to the United States can be triangulated from three trends that will collide in fireworks: Boomer retirement, natural gas exhaustion, and oil exhaustion.

I’m sorry in advance, this is kinda macro and like economically existential. If you don’t want to read it all, the TL;DR is basically: The biggest generation is retiring and we’re running out of gas and oil all at the same time. Since we’re currently the biggest oil consumer (20% of the world total) and biggest gas consumer (double the EU) and our whole economy is sort of predicated on that fact, I think the confluence of supporting the Boomers in retirement and the exhaustion of our domestic reserves is going to create an economic crisis. The idiots in charge will likely just keep putting us into more debt.

Anyway, by 2030 all the Baby Boomers will be over 65 years old and will have entered the era of their life when people come to believe they—despite holding the majority of the country’s wealth, decision-making power, and media narratives—also deserve things from the government. And for what it’s worth, many do deserve things, but regardless of deservedness, the fact remains: we’re about to see an enormous spike in old people on Medicare.

At about the same time, our oil and natural gas reserves will run out, forcing us to rely on energy alternatives that have not yet come into maturity. Perhaps we will discover more fossil fuels within our little Nation, but as of 2016 in the United States we had about 14 years left (until 2030) of proven natural gas reserves and about 11 years left (until 2027) of proven oil reserves. This means that at current rates both will be fading out over the next decade. Neither will cease, but the domestic rates of extraction will both fall off a cliff requiring us to rely on imports to maintain the same rate of economic activity.

The unique direness of our 14 year time horizon only becomes clear when we consider the situations in other rival nations. For instance, despite Russia being the second largest producer of natural gas (behind the US), they also have at least 77 years of gas production remaining at current rates. Iran, also an enormous natural gas producer, has 143 years remaining at current rates. And on the oil production front, again, where we’ve got about a decade left at current rates, Iran has 214 years remaining and Venezuela has 1,500.

US has a decent amount of oil, but we’re extracting it faster right now than anyone.

Elsewhere, the idea of energy independence can in fact go straight through fossil fuels. In the United States, it must go through renewables. Oil and gas of course only make up about 8% of our current GDP, but they also facilitate a lot of the rest—though combustion in engines and power plants—from Amazon deliveries to agriculture to climate change conferences.

The question is then are we going to be able to import enough fossils to make energy so we can still doomscroll through Instagram and order Cheetos from Whole Foods from bed? I mean, maybe. Since 2008 we’ve basically cut our imports of oil (from 11 to 6) and gas (from 112 to 45) in half.

Oil Imports—these days we’re at about 6 million per day.

We used to import a ton of oil and gas and then in 2008 were like, yo, we’ve got a little of both left, and also we found a bunch of gas in North Dakota, and also our economy is a trainwreck because some piece of shit finance bros were doing predatory lending schemes and so how bout we just burn the rest of this shit fast and hot and prop up our economy until we all die and leave this abused marketplace to the younger generations to figure out?

They’ll love a Black guy as President, that way they won’t ask questions and just sort of believe in some watery way that progress is inevitable. Young people are so much less racist than us, huh? Just like with voting suffrage, we’ll do Black men first, then women later, okay, it’s 2016 now let’s do a woman President. Oops, now we’re doing a vacuous narcissist instead—in a way, more fitting.

Let’s extend the debt ceiling now. Let’s only put people in Congress who know that we’re fucked and so will never actually talk seriously about balancing the budget. Okay, now let’s only talk about cultural issues until we die. MSNBC will talk about January 6th until 2030 when we run out of fossil fuels. Fox News will talk about Hunter Biden’s laptop. When they ask about renewable energy just keep kicking the can down the road. When they ask about energy independence, pivot to activists shutting down pipelines.

This is the reality: The economic livelihood of the United States is right now predicated on oil and natural gas consumption, and we’re about to run out of domestic production of both. Meanwhile, the biggest generation of people in history hold all the financial and political power and are moving into their dying period. 10% of all healthcare dollars spent are on end-of-life care. Each year we spend about $3.5 trillion on health care, thus $350 billion on end-of-life care. In about 2030 I think it’s going to start feeling really hard to make this work in the United States without just lying to everyone.