Sound off on solutions for Climage Change/Oil Dependence

[SlicerDicer-]

Without having Exxon or other Oil Companies. What would you do without oil? How do you think life would be? What are solutions you can see forward? Please tell me what your thoughts are I think that would make a interesting discussion. :)

It will be interesting to see what replies there are. However be warned solutions must not include continual use of oil. Oil can be used to get to the solution but the solution must have a Energy Returned on Energy Invested that exceeds 1:1 so it could be considered viable.

Note: If you say build wind turbines. You must consider turning trains over to electric to haul the parts, explain how to get steel smelted and carbon removed without coke, erecting without diesel powered cranes, labor gotten to site without gasoline etc.

[Speck Tater]

1. Extinction of the human race comes to mind.

If that's too drastic, how about the extinction of the private automobile? That would do the trick for sure.

[Fearless]

2. Invest in bicycles

[SlipperySlope]

3. Solutions?

"However be warned solutions must not include continual use of oil."

Why? Even if it was a working solution?

Consider this plan:

The current population of the planet earth is around 6.7 billion. Assume we find a method to reduce that to 50 million people (or so). Those 50 million survivors could each double or triple their oil consumption and there would still be a significant net reduction in oil usage.

[Captain Angry]

4. Due to the amount of petroleum based plastic, fertilizer and pesticides...

oil's not going away.

And nobody that I've heard of is saying that we should stop using all oil starting next Wednesday. There has to be a drawdown that starts with new vehicles being produced that don't use the stuff at all. Full electric.

If all ground based passenger vehicles were to stop using oil/gasoline, global demand would fall such that diesel gets back to being useful for trains, buses.
nt.

If the electric grid were built up and made more redundant, augmented by local and remote sources of renewable energy in regions that work best for their technologies, we could deploy fully electric vehicles country wide.


There's a process, but it needs to start, and in a big freakin' way. Right now. As it stands, we're using oil to make a 3000 pound vehicle move 300 pounds worth of passengers and their goods. It's terribly inefficie

[SlicerDicer-]

5. Well maybe

Fertilizer makes the soil toxic and salinity rise, this can only go on so long till you wind up with problems like Australia has.
Pesticides are poisoning the planet and killing so much as collateral damage its questionable if we will continue.
Plastics can be made from various vegetable oils.

I did not say we would stop but I was asking energy independence and that leaves us with a narrow margin.

Agreed on the process needs to start :) I am very tired I will post after I wake up in the morning. Might make a bit more sense heh.

[Captain Angry]

7. I have no doubt that the non-natural pesticide/fertilizers are bad.

We're overusing our water to grow crops that aren't intended for market, and we're modifying these crops so that stay ripe longer for more distant shipment. We're ruining our topsoil for something that isn't the best use of the land.

There are MASSIVE problems with the global agricultural system.

We need to get off of fuel of all kinds for passenger transport. As engines and batteries become better, material transport vehicles can move to more efficient systems.

Our research should be into the companies developing the batteries, the engines, the vegetable oil plastics. We should be spending on that, but right now our government is writing checks to oil companies and coal companies in subsidies. And they're not going after the taxes and royalties that were agreed to.

If we want to go to an ethanol based system, we should have a national laboratory developing neon orange corn or something that takes no water, few nutrients from the soil and is 50x more energy than normal corn. Normal corn is for eating. We should have labs developing crops that can grow in Arizona's desert that can be used for fuel production. Leave North Dakota, California, North Carolina, Texas for human consumption food. And only the crops that belong in those areas. Tripling the water in one place to make something not native to the region is just wasteful.

The investment needs to be made. The government has several nuclear laboratories. We could probably cut that to two or three and use the other ones solely for technology development on batteries, agriculture, medicine, etc. Put some people to work on useful stuff instead of Viagra, sleeping pills and restless leg syndrome.

[bhikkhu]

6. Consume less and stop having so many babies

That's about it.

[GliderGuider]

8. You could look at it this way

Our problems are well past the point where voluntary changes in human activity could prevent large-scale, traumatic changes to our industrial civilization and the people who depend on it to live. The crisis goes far beyond climate change and oil dependency, to encompass all manner of ecological degradation (the death of the oceans, soil fertility depletion, fresh water depletion etc.) and economic destabilization.

Here's an alternative view of the situation we're in:

• There are no technical "solutions" to the converging crisis;
  
• The roots of the crisis are in human behaviour as mediated by our global culture and our biological makeup;
  
• Our behaviour will not change radically until our culture supports the change;
  
• Our culture will not support or even permit such change until its guardian economic, political, educational and communications institutions have lost power;
  
• Those institutions will not lose power until their ability to function is compromised;
  
• Their ability to function is already being compromised by the growing crisis in energy, ecology and economic, and the increasing problems will ultimately cause failure avalanches within those institutions;
  
• Once the guardian institutions lose their grip, new patterns of understanding, belief and behaviour will emerge that are in line with the changing circumstances;
  
• These new patterns will tend towards one of two primary forms depending on those circumstances -- either long term sustainability based on expanded consciousness of the web of life, or "Mad Max";
  
• The global movement of millions of independent, local environmental and social justice groups means that it's possible we will see enough of the changes toward sustainability to enable the regrowth of a more humane civilization;
  
• Like all else in human history no particular outcome is guaranteed.

For a more thorough explanation of this perspective, see the article Cultural Change at the Limits to Growth.

[depakid]

9. "What would you do without oil?"

That has been the dominant theme this week at VBC 8 (the Village Building Convergence) in Portland, Oregon.

One of the many cool things we got into was a workshop with a nascent group called Urban Edibles. It's something anyone can do in their own towns. Indeed, we plan to spread the idea to Newcastle, NSW later on this fall.

Urban Edibles

This workshop is designed to orient village builders with wild edibles growing in the Portland area. We will be taking a short plant hike, identifying common weeds and expanding at length on their various uses. We will also cover medicinal preparations for certain plants as well as the ways in which our website can help you change Portland. This will be completely informal and open to everyone.

About URBAN EDIBLES

http://www.urbanedibles.org

Urban Edibles is collaboration between wild foods foragers in Portland, Oregon. Our belief is that by way of communing edible goods, urban people may develop meaningful connections with their environment and their neighbors. Our hope is to generate discourse around local foods, urban stewardship and DIY methods of harvest.

Over the past year, we’ve established an interactive wild foods map of Portland, Oregon (which may be found at www.urbanedibles.org). We have included fruit and nut trees, vegetables, edible and medicinal herbs, “weeds” and more. We have encouraged foragers, land stewards and other community denizens to contribute to our map as well as an educational resource database for wild foods that appears on our site.
----------------

Check out the workshop list for other fine ideas about living in a post carbon world:

http://www.cityrepair.org/wiki.php/projects/vbc8/workshops

[SlicerDicer-]

10. Putting this question forth in the way that I have.

It shows how interlinked we are on Oil and how difficult it is to leave. It is a almost impossible task given all the people.. All the businesses everything all combined there is going to have to be some serious destruction and decimation of much of the way America operates today. We would not be able to import food as we do today, everything will have to be grown locally by and large, greenhouses likely will become common, people working from home more than in a service industry that is fully propped up by oil, speculative real estate will go bye bye as there will not be the capability to move round round the merry go round like we do today.

And one hope that I have is that families move back close by each other.. Communities act like them as well and treat each other with dignity and work together :)

[depakid]

12. On the energy front, I see no viable substitute for oil as it applies to transportation

which means that globalization and inefficient transport of goods and produce in North America will be curtailed- and it will be up to local communities and regions to develop new ways of living and providing things for themselves.

I find this to be a silver lining- decomplexification has loads of beneficial attributes that are well worth the trade off for losing 2,000 mile salads and pesticide and e coli laden greens at consolidated supermarkets.

Interestingly enough, one of the societies that managed to avoid collapse and maintained a relatively high level of functioning and culture was Byzantium during Europe's dark ages. They achieved this through re-localizing in a loosely bound "confederation," which was a precurser of the medieval feudal system.

Not that we're going to progress in that direction, but as you mention, it's inevitable that:

"We will not be able to import food as we do today, everything will have to be grown locally by and large, greenhouses likely will become common, people working from home more than in a service industry that is fully propped up by oil, speculative real estate will go bye bye as there will not be the capability to move round round the merry go round like we do today."

Yep- families and communities will grow closer together as the world once again becomes a larger place.

In that regard, you might enjoy this blog entry (all the entries are insightful) about a similar conference:

Positive Energy: creative community responses to peak oil and climate change

http://transitionculture.org/2008/03/31/positive-energy-creative-community-responses-to-peak-oil-and-climate-change-day-7-heinberg-lochhead-closing-and-home/

[SlicerDicer-]

15. There is viable alternatives however people do not like them

People do not like the idea of having to powerdown their Auto. I would be willing to bet that nobody here knows how to ride a horse. There is that one alternative as well as you can walk.. Ride a bicycle however all of this involves close distance travel that does not allow for 45 mile commutes as people are doing today nor does it allow for long distance travel to visit family. This is precisely why I say families will move closer together. One thing I do wonder is what will happen to all the spare homes. There is 9 homes per person in this nation.. People will evacuate areas that are now packed such as Phoenix Arizona, I feel this is the case as oil is no longer able to run things water will become scarce there.

So there will be empty houses.. Not to mention we baked ourself in terms of our need to destroy farmland. We have plowed under prime land for tract farming that makes no sense at all, I have seen since I was in high school all the prime farmland near the river get plowed up for McMansions and the topsoil plowed under.. I have seen the groves ripped out, I have seen vineyards ripped out and this is just for starters.. I live in a desert so it is very difficult to repair the soil with modern techniques you have to look to the past of the people who had more "brains" than we did even if they were overall less "educated". These people are few and far between now and I wish that schools would hire these people to teach proper organic land practices before it is too late.

I do not understand what the need to build so many houses is.. It flies in the face of everything other than consumerism and greed. It shuts down the small farms that would have been very useful in feeding the populace.. Destroyed land that was once viable.. For what? Some person who wished to move to the "farm area" to get away from the city and brought their stench with them. And sad fact these people will be the first to evac as they would go somewhere they deem "safer" instead of attempting to fix the problem they created.

I see a very doomerish future in my lifetime and I am learning as much as I can about everything possible in regards to companion planting, land repair and everything else so maybe.. just maybe I can teach others when they finally come around to the fact that things are going to hell. Not that I wish for it to be this way or want to see it that way I would much rather see people live on without hardship as I would like to do the same but reality tells a different story. Powerdown will be just that a true Powerdown.

[Shoelace]

16. transition towns in UK, very impressive, hopeful solutions

just this am, I ran into alot of info on how these "transition towns" are speaking to future issues of a life without oil. They address such issues as "re skilling" or learning the valuable skills of the past, building skills, planting forests for wood burning, permaculture such as Havana, Cuba has been doing since their oil supply was virtually cut off.
They are trying this in Whistler, Canada as well and the UK has at least a dozen towns who are transition towns. As an old hippy, I think that we had the right idea all along back in the '60s before drugs destroyed the goals. We actually lived without electricity as sort of a "trial" period for nearly 6 months with little money, living on local fruit and whatever we could share with others, taking showers under rain gutters with Bronner's soap, etc., but that was on the Big Island in Hawaii so it was far easier than it would be in most places. Yet, it was a start and we did learn alot.
Semi-communal communities are a good idea but one that flies in the face of our present capitalistic culture, especially in the US.

There's a series on You Tube about these transition towns here (4 pt. series, 10+ minutes each - #3 so far is the most detailed):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3mxCxA-t3s&feature=related

At "Transitionculture.org" you can find a handbook appropriatly entitled "The Transition Handbook."
http://transitionculture.org/shop/the-transition-handbook/

Also, there's an interesting blog about transition town economics and other thoughts here:
http://gaianeconomics.blogspot.com/search/label/Transition%20Towns

I'm probably going to spend a great deal of time researching these towns and how they do what they do. I am so glad I kept my Foxfire books!

[Contradistinction]

11. Yep

Stop breeding. Limit couples to 1 kid. Stop rewarding people for having them by revering their tax breaks. Instead, make them pay more in taxes & give huge tax incentives for those that don't have any kids.

[The2ndWheel]

13. More overt slavery

Or, if alternatives(even though oil is technically an alternative) can save us, continued environmental problems, just different.

To solve it, probably make it more difficult and more expensive to extract energy from the environment. Do that, and get rid of an economy based on growth(and which economic system isn't?), and you've got a shot. Then again, we've got 6.5 billion+ people on the planet, and that whole progress concept. So that really doesn't solve anything.

[excess_3]

14. the electric car .n/t

[wtmusic]

17. Electric vehicles and fusion to power them.

Need government investment on the scale of 1960s NASA.

[ironrooster]

18. railway redux

1)decentralized power - municipalities need to generate own elec.,provide own water storage.
2)smaller communities
3)population control not needed - will take care of itself because of food crisis (you haven't seen anything yet).
4)electric vehicles
5)work-at home mandatory where viable
6)teleconferencing (much more of this)
7)allocate a % of land outside municipalities taken by imminent domain for agriculture

[SlicerDicer-]

19. 7) will be slightly differenet IMO

As if we did that here it would be worthless land.. However if we Doze the McMansions down by the river that was once agriculture land it would be far more useful IMO.. At that point it wont matter anyway.