Excerpted from a longer article by Jeff Vail, advocate of the Diagonal Economy, on 2010 as a tipping point:

“2010 is the year we commit to Catabolic Collapse–the concept that our civilization will experience a long, slow, and bumpy decline over the next several decades. We spent 2009 desperately scrambling to fabricate a recovery out of everything we could find in the armament: loan, stimulus, outright bribes to buy houses or new cars, and even occasionally the attempt to enforce some of the laws that could have limited the excesses that were revealed in 2008.

This short-term focus has created several problems for us. First, we didn’t really do a damn thing about energy. Lower prices were the result of declining demand (especially in the US, where it was “easy”–e.g. high proportion of high elasticity demand). Calls for real change in energy efficiency standards or renewable energy generation seemed to fade with 3-digit prices just in time to escape being targeted by the “what cooking utensil can we throw now at the problem” approach. As a result, we’re now poised for a short-lived recovery (at least in energy consumption) in the US in 2010, as well as an accelerated rate of energy consumption growth it much of the developing world. Supplies held relatively steady while the price of oil crashed from nearly $150/barrel to nearly $30 barrel, effectively making any renewable energy investment that depends on oil a more than $30-$40/barrel unlikely on the economics alone. Likewise, from a political standpoint, far too many think that oil prices spiked because of speculators. As a result, the political will to address price volatility (such as with a significant gas tax redirecting energy to renewables investment) and proactively avert market-driven demand destruction as supplies decline has evaporated. At best, we have five years of a relative production plateau (that is only if all megaproject predictions pan out), and then we’re in for production decline–I don’t see anything in 2010 that will show our intent to build the foundation of renewable generation we’ll need to avoid the Renewables Gap and be in any way prepared for the downslope of fossil fuel production…

Where does this leave us for 2010: I think we’ll actually turn the corner from “muddling” to “recovery” in 2010. I won’t be a very egalitarian form of recovery–especially if you are a formerly well paid industrial worker that still captures the attention of the American news media, but there will be a bit of life breathed into the markets for houses and cars, and the results will be another confrontation between energy supply and demand. Some locales will address this directly, and there will be some real improvements in energy efficiency and the creation of local self-sufficiency, but the reality of energy descent will begin to cut the legs out from underneath any generalized increase in prosperity shortly–perhaps not in 2010, but not long thereafter. I’d expect another economic slowdown to begin at the end of 2010 as oil prices break and hold just over $100/barrel by the end of the year after an earlier dip (voila, there’s my oil price prediction . . . though I’m less bullish for 2011).

The bigger picture, though, is that centralized government seems structurally incapable of mustering the political and economic program necessary to seriously re-evaluate and address how it attempts to order our civilization. What will happen instead–perhaps as early as the end of 2010, is that we’ll again mobilize in support of some near-term and media friendly rallying cry to solve the ___ problem (probably energy, but hell, it could be crime, healthcare, trade wars, blackouts, even piracy for all we know). The focus on the effervescent economic recovery of 2010 will repeat the general cycle–rally the populace around the promise that-near term recovery is possible, and that we don’t need to listen to the loonies advocating for fundamental changes. It is this process that confirms a future of Catabolic Collapse. Probably driven by energy, but with political and social swings exacerbating the situation as populists of all stripes try to offer their own rallying cries, we’ll see the continued degradation of both modernity (to the extent it still exists in the Nation-State construct) and the unabated slide down the energy descent amusement ride.

I can’t say I find this prediction particularly distressing, precisely because I think the potential of Rhizome and the Diagonal Economy depend on a collapse that isn’t too fast to do anything about (asteroid), too slow to recognize, but just right… Many will lament the losses of time-honored institutions, but frankly I don’t think any centralized and hierarchal powers structure can address the Problem of Growth. We’ll have to do that for ourselves.

I don’t have any bold “this specific event will happen here” predictions for 2010, but I do want to give one location-specific example of where I think this trend toward the degradation of the Nation-State construct will be especially severe: India. No, I don’t think India will collapse (though there will be plenty of stories of woe), nor that the state government that occupies most of the geographic territory of “India” will collapse (note that careful wording). Rather, I think that the trend for a disconnection between any abstract notion of “Nation” and a unitary state in India will become particularly pronounced over the course of 2010. This is already largely apparent in India, but look for it to become more so. While Indian business and economy will fare decently well in 2010 from an international trade perspective, the real story will be a rising failure of this success to be effectively distributed by the government outside of a narrow class of urban middle class. It will instead be a rising connectivity and self-awareness of their situation among India’s rural poor, resulting in an increasing push for localized self-sufficiency and resiliency of food production (especially the “tipping” of food forests and perennial polycultures), that will most begin to tear at the relevancy of India’s central state government. In India there is a great potential for the beginnings of the Diagonal Economy to emerge in 2010.”