Plotting the size of the iceberg

The tip of the iceberg

One of the key lessons of the World Without Oil game: oil is everywhere and in everything, and once you start interrupting its flow, weird things start to happen. They can be little things at first, but as seen from the boots on the ground, little unpleasant things add up quickly to koyanniqatsi, a life that must be lived differently. An example: gasoline theft. If it happens once, you grouse. If it happens four times, you stop buying gasoline. Another example: food prices. Milk goes up: you grouse. What do you do when the price of everything in every store is going up (but your income isn’t)? Well, some people are going to start stealing gasoline.

The mainstream media hasn’t really absorbed this yet. The stories I read talk about these incidents as though they are isolated. But they’re not: they’re all the click of one domino hitting two others. So without further ado here are 50 clicks for you, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal. (Thanks to WWO pal David Markham for the link; photo by timsamoff via Flickr.)