I've written some form of this a good couple of times now, and I'll probably be doing it again plenty of times in the future. But now I'll just repeat myself to cap off some of the discussion that has been going on here.
What makes the world industrial system so powerful is its global reach, its ability to colonize almost every corner of the globe for exploitation. It then can sustain constant flows of enormous amounts of resources from these points of exploitation, constantly regenerating itself as it transforms and comes apart. With all of the problems of over-tooling for efficiency with "just in time" production and concentrated single supply chains and bare bones staffing structures which induce a brittleness to the system, there is at the same time an implied redundancy in the greater system, just due to the sheer amount of resources in circulation.
But that same universality and ubiquity of power affects a constant and simultaneous degradation of the zones of exploitation, the general environment at greater scales, and a simultaneous weakening of the industrial system itself. You get failures, or even catastrophes, after this simultaneous weakening causes a critical point to fail, yes, and it is a terrible thing for those unlucky enough to be caught in those failures. The real danger however, is that these failures cause dislocations and displacements that put ever more pressure on other proximate points of weakness already under strain, causing additional failures, which accelerate and build up ever more momentum: the cascading failures we've been hearing more and more about.
Yes it sounds bad, yes it probably will be bad. But it also takes a while. And historically we've seen this before, just at smaller scales and energy registers. We're really mucking it up over a global scale with incredible amounts of energy this time.
