The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

by Peter Zeihan

Lead’s toxicity generates no end of health complications in the brain, up to and including encouraging dissociative and violent behavior. In the United States we began purging lead from our systems in the 1970s, systematically banning its use in product after product. Over the next half century, the ambient level of lead in our air dropped by more than 90 percent. At the same time, instances of violent crimes subsided from record highs to record lows. Correlation? Definitely. Causation? Let’s go with a strong maybe.*

Some three-quarters of the world’s platinum-group metals (PGMs) are sourced from a single country—South Africa—where nearly everything comes from a single rock formation, the Bushveld Igneous Complex.

The Bushveld practically leaks chromium, iron ore, tin, and vanadium, but the South Africans brush right by all these world-class deposits to go after the good stuff: the platinum-group ores that here—and only here—exist in an unadulterated state, unmixed with other, lesser ores. Lesser ores like freakin’ titanium.

China isn’t a top-five producer, importer, or exporter of a single one of the raw or finished PGMs. The technologies that use PGMs are simply beyond the Chinese.

The Europeans, in the most peaceful and wealthy period in their history, have proven incapable of coming together for a common cheese policy, a common banking policy, a common foreign policy, or a common refugee policy—much less a common strategic policy.

The 2020s and 2030s will be exceedingly uncomfortable for many, but this too will pass.

If you ever find yourself needing to stress test an energy-related theory, Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba serves as a one-stop shop. That’s not quite right. The guy has written more books on the reality of energy than I have socks, and my sock game handily exceeds that of the Canadian prime minister. His works most useful to this project: Energy and Civilization: A History and Prime Movers of Globalization.