Recently Collapsenet.com, the website focusing on issues of peak oil, climate change, and surviving the coming economic/ecological collapse, featured a trailer for a documentary they’ve been working on regarding Las Vegas, one of the most glaring victims of current and potentially upcoming severe, collapse. On one hand it exists in the middle of the desert with few natural resources, and on the other it’s an energy sucking mega metropolis completely reliant on an enormous amount of incoming cheap energy. Not to mention the idea that the city is essentially “made and sustained by losers”; a business model which relies heavily on addiction and loss.
Signs of said collapse are already present. Shut down establishments, housing bubble bursts, declining tourist turnouts in recent years (though it does appears numbers are being reported as UP in 2012; the real factors of which are unclear, and likely wouldn’t consider off factors such as Nevada’s pot farming tripling in the last few years, and the reality that the American populace have clearly lost their mind, to the point of the absurd):
LAS VEGAS (FOX5) –
A new slogan was unveiled Wednesday for downtown Las Vegas.
“Every City Has a Soul” was the winning tag line of more than 1,200 online votes.
A few years back, a prime-time special on peak oil/resource depletion somehow squeeked by and was featured on one of the main networks (can’t recall the title). It depicted a look at what the near future would look like as cheap energy ran out and collapse took effect. One segment animated a travel through a now deserted, decrepid Vegas, occupied only by rogue gangs looking to hijack passer by’s. Extreme, but portrayals of doom and gloom usually accept a crashed and burned scenario, bringing back the city to it’s desolate desert origins.
Left out of the conversation of course, is the influx of near future Cold Fusion possibilities. Collapsenet’s documentary will likely not include this (we already presented former Collapsenet frontman Mike Ruppert Cold Fusion answers to his alternative energy talking points, which were more or less dismissed…link to follow).
What happens in Vegas, won’t stay in Vegas this time around, as many aspects of Collapse are already occurring worldwide, and likely to worsen. How, when, to what degree the coming age of Cold Fusion will halt, repair, replenish or rebuild the situation entirely is unclear. The thought of Vegas folding it’s hand first, and Cold Fusion appearing second might sound preferable to some, but at the rate things are happening on the Fusion front, and the desperate soul labeling – seems to be somehow slightly working – attempt to hold on to current paradigms will mean the technology gets thrusted towards upholding the loser model.
Of course the Vegas scenario presents a larger question overall on how the technology will be used more for nostalgia upholding rather than new, healthier more fulfilling ways of existing.
It’ll be interesting to watch the completed Collapsenet Vegas documentary, and then fill in the blanks of how the implications of CF may alter the doom and gloom predicted and portrayed.
CollapseNet’s First Full-Length Documentary To Focus On Las Vegas Trailer from CollapseNet.com on Vimeo.
