Life after the oil crash ( dot net )

[f the letter]

http://lifeaftertheoilcrash.net

Has anyone read this? Is anyone as scared as i am?

And does anyone have any way to argue with this? It seems like common sense in reading it, just common sense we've been in denial over for decades.


Tell your friends / kick / recommend.. people need to hear this message. Biofuel is not enough, nuclear power is not enough, energy-efficient lightbulbs and hybrid vehicles are not enough, minor lifestyle changes of any kind are not enough. These things are all good and probably necessary in the _VERY_ near term but fully inadequate for what is to come if this is on point.

[f the letter]

1. _

edit: accidental post

[cliffordu]

2. YEP - I'm there....

I'll have an acre and a half garden in next year (should have done it this year, but didn't find the space till recently...now I have to clear the land) and some chickens before this summer is over, maybe some goats.....

I am trying to do solar but cannot come up with the scratch....

James Howard Kustler has some great ideas - some are not practical but some are....small towns 'converted' into mostly self-sustaining villages...community gardens.....

The time is now. We are not going to survive as a species unless 'sustainable' becomes the operative term.....

[lapfog_1]

3. Ditto... put in about 1/2 acre this year..

planning to put in over an acre next year... and some green houses.

Maybe even growing some jatropha plants (need to find out more)... already got a couple of old diesel trucks.

Our own wind turbine and solar panels are on the longer term plans... need to save some money for those.

[Aqaba]

4. Lots of scenarios

I read Savinar's site regularly, you should also visit http://www.theoildrum.com.

There are a lot of prognostications with regards to peak oil, some say we will return to the stone age, others think we will be living off of solar/microbe-powered mass transit.

Nobody really knows what is going to happen. The only things we can really point to are these:

1. Petroleum demand is currently outstripping supply on a global scale.
2. Most of the supergiant oilfields are in terminal decline (the Saudi's wont come out and say it, but data suggests they are)
3. No US politician is coming out and saying, "The age of hydrocarbons is coming to an end, and we must prepare for it now!" Instead they offer bullshit about dependency on foreign oil (Obama included). (Actually there is one, Roscoe Bartlett, a Republican, he requested a report from the GAO on Peak Oil in general --> here's a link ->> http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2414).

It is scary to consider. The implication is a total, global, financial and industrial reversal/meltdown, over a decade or two. Our entire 21st century economic progress was based off of cheap hydrocarbons and our access to them (read Iraq/Saudi/Iran/Venezuela/Nigeria, etc etc etc). Famines, wars, you-name-it-biblical-scenario kinda stuff.

The only thing I can say that I believe with regards to this, is that the problem is on a scale that we haven't seen before, and that our politicians are either lying to us or aren't well-informed. The Kool-Aid currently renders its victims to think in terms of an oil-based economy, forever.

I'm pretty much in the 'We're fucked because nobody with a soapbox is saying anything real'.

One thing to remember. The US and Russia still have a *shitload* of nukes pointed at each other. And our geopolitical game over oil is just about over. Will a button be pressed in pursuit of 'the win'?

Anyhoo.

Safi

[Delphinus]

5. Welcome, Aqaba!

I agree with your post - especially point number 3.

There are lots of solutions, but not one candidate, either nationally or locally, will talk about this. Most of us in America have lived the "high life" for a long time (and I'm not sure we ever appreciated all that we have), but no one wants to talk about what's coming. And we NEED to talk about what's coming. I am of the firm belief that if we know what's going on, we will come together collectively and find a way to deal.

[Strelnikov_]

7. I am also in the 'Doomer - Political' camp

I have concluded that there are adequate mitigation options to maintain the relatively comfortable lives we now lead if we are willing to undergo societal transformation (conservation, re-localization, abandonment of the consumo-society). In other words, we live like the 20's, with more social justice, energy conservation and the internet.

Problem is, we need to begin the transformation before chronic shortages begin, or the center will not hold.

The political class, through ignorance, is doing nothing to raise awareness of the threat facing us if we do not prepare. Some because they are corrupt (Republican), some because they are afraid about not getting re-elected when the Republican brands them a Socialist for promoting re-localization and conservation plans.



The river's rising.

It's never too late to start your lifeboat.

A half-built boat is better than none at all.

[frogcycle]

6. eventually mother nature will prevail

the issue is there are too many people on the planet. She'll take care of that somehow and a reasonable balance will be struck. Either humanity will grasp this and deal with it sensibly, or catastrophic crashing of the population, likely from pandemic, will do it.

[GliderGuider]

8. My take on it

The problem is that our civilization has already passed too many tipping points for any prevention of large scale change to be realistic. These tipping points include not only oil and gas supplies, but also: global primary energy demand outstripping supply; global warming leading to glacier melt and disruption of rainfall patterns; limits to the global food supply; massive species extinctions; our social complexity that is outgrowing our ability to manage it (including the logistical requirements of global food distribution); and our financial system being on the brink of crashing.

All of these problems interact, making it difficult to solve one without making others worse. Many of the important ones (like climate change, social complexity or some aspects of peak oil) IMO don't have technical solutions.

Resilience theory tells us that the efficiency and resilience of complex systems tend to be inversely related. As a complex adaptive system like a civilization becomes more efficient in order to meet growing needs in a resource-constrained environment, it becomes more brittle and prone to failure avalanches. It seems to me inevitable that we will see such failure cascades in our civilization within the next few years, and may even be seeing them already (e.g. energy problems in the third world).

I expect these ripples of failure to propagate and gather momentum within the next decade or so. The time frame is so short, the potential for disruption so large, and the institutional opposition to change so great that I think the only effective responses will be personal. Taking that expectation to its logical conclusion, and given that there is no realistic way to prevent large-scale social change (whether there is an outright collapse or not), it means that a consciousness-raising strategy is the one general approach likely to help the most people in the shortest time.

[Bigmack]

9. Alas, you're

"spot on" as per usual. Been there, thought all that myself..... Old Chinese curse...."May you live in interesting times." We do. Ms Bigmack

[Terry in Austin]

10. "Defcon" scenarios

Matt Savinar may be leaning hard on the alarm -- he's a "Defcon 1" -- but he's basically right on.

Check the post upthread about varying scenarios. Anybody who "gets it" about Peak Oil comes to understand what a radical, fundamental change it's going to bring about. Then they usually try to estimate just how radical -- catastrophic-head-for-the-hills radical ("Defcon 1") or just bewildering-sweaty-inconvenient radical ("Defcon 5").

I think this range represents a classic probability curve, with the most likely somewhere in the middle. So the smart thing would be to hedge your bets and apportion your preparation efforts according to the probabilities. Matt, on the other hand, has placed all his chips on the left side of the bell curve. He's probably converting his assets to gold and building a cabin somewhere. Not that he'd lose much if things turn out to be milder...

But even a middling Defcon 3 scenario is no stroll in the mall. Literally. And it's a lot more probable than the merely-inconvenient Defcon 5. Please note that "Business as usual" is not even on the curve. An energy-savvy bookie will give that about the same odds as cold fusion or UFO power.

It is pretty scary, with all the unknowns. We're facing having to adapt to a low-energy future, after several generations of being spoiled by hundreds of "energy slaves" to meet our needs and whims. The car-centric, big-box, isolated way of life will no longer be with us. But hey, there's some pretty good news in that!

Meanwhile, you do what you can to prepare -- get out of debt, move to where things are within walking/biking distance, grow some veggies, join a CSA, meet your neighbors... the list goes on.

[lectrobyte]

11. Yes, I've been convinced that resource depletion is the issue of our age for

a while now.