Can this scenario wait until Tuesday? My daughter's coming home from college . . .
Military action around the globe would pretty much come to a screeching halt. All the folks far from home would be stranded. My poor children would be home-schooled (they have thanked me for not doing this to them, but like all good curriculum junkies, I have enough to keep us going for years. Why? No clue. I now have a rationale, so thank you).
The poor speculators who are intent on driving the price of oil as far through the roof as tulip bulbs during the Bubble will have to scramble to find another host.
Rand Paul would have the Right to Work. (Even in the hero shots pasted in his ads, he looks like he's never seen either working end of a two-man saw before, doesn't he?)
Agriculture will be transformed, as most of the Green Revolution crops are heavily dependent upon fossil fuels, and our artifically-high population numbers will adjust accordingly. This will be painful for all involved. Heritage plants and animals that are adapted to local conditions would be cultivated again, and the hybrid seed market would collapse.
Ferraris, Priuses, and Lambourghinis, with the useless heavy engines and the obstructing windshields removed, will be found to make nice little trotting carts. People who do have jobs will find out that living within biking, skiing, and walking distance makes a lot of sense. Draft horses will become valued assets rather than living museum pieces.
After a period of adjustment, I think we'd get back to the business at hand of living. Think about it. Maybe the way we live is Not Normal. We live a life of ease, and thoughtlessly take for granted a level of effortless comfort that the world has never seen. Maybe we'd just get back to living the way that most people have lived through most centuries and millennia. Maybe instead of clutching one another in terror and asking via our little electronic pets, "What if! we had to push up our sleeves and get to work!", we'd just do it.
Maybe colleges would offer less art history and more wind/water/tide-energy generation classes, more agriculture and normal school classes, and people would be eager to attend because of useful information they could acquire. More children would be homeschooled, or go to the little neighborhood school that didn't require behemoth buses to transport them.
Maybe we'd stop building idiotic MacMansions and lived in houses that fit our family sizes and needs, were oriented to the sun's heat, were insulated against heat loss, and were situated in locations convenient to our places of work (which might be home on the family farm). Children might be regarded as assets and respected for their contribution to the good of the common order, instead of kept as pets that get whatever leftover bits of time are available in the mad rush to accrue and consume. They, in turn, would learn where food, clothing, and shelter come from, and that he who does not work does not eat.
We'd find designs for carpet beaters in the museums, and start making them and bartering them to one another. We'd learn to play those musical instruments sitting in the closet that everyone is too busy to play anymore. We'd learn to converse with one another in the firelight instead of sitting in front of flickering 21st-century fires and letting paid surrogates have our conversations for us. We'd get to know our neighbors instead of conversing with people we'll never meet on the other side of the country or world.
Government would be transformed, and another group of people would understand the meaning of calluses as they left Washington and tried to parlay lobbying into a marketable skill. Even the Martin Sheens and Rush Limbaughs of the world might shut up and pick up some tools.
I'm going through a bit of a field-ground shift as I start to accrue wood for the coming years. I passed a fuel oil truck as I was zooming home to grab my truck to pick up some pallets last week, and realized that if it came to it, I could make it without that truck ever pulling in my driveway again. And then I started thinking about how artificial a way of life that is--and that we've grown so dependent upon it that we consider it normal. And, as the title of this thread suggests, so much so that the idea of doing without strikes terror into out hearts.
Maybe, just maybe, instead of complete mayhem and terror and the END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT, we'd heave a collective sigh of relief, shake our heads and ask, "Wow, that was some ride, wasn't it?" and in the ensuing silence, learn to listen to ourselves and one another.