Those of you who follow me know that I have recently ceased making posts urging large-scale reform. The reasons for that are fairly simple, but they involve a psychological hurdle to get over.

I have been communicating with James Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer, and David Holmgren, all of whom I have interviewed, about a Wise Action Plan. The goal was for us to agree on this Plan and then publicly pronounce it in an effort to get some sensible action on peak oil and climate change. Initially, I urged a response that included a revitalization of rail, large-scale wind or solar farms, and other actions that require the federal government to take a strong leadership role.

While the others generally agreed such actions would be a good idea, especially if they have been started 20 or more years ago, two of the three thought they were a waste of time. They had two reasons for this:

1. It’s too late. We needed to be getting off oil while we still had a surplus. Now that we’ve hit peak oil, diverting any oil to build solar panels means there is less for cars or crops.
2. They ain’t gonna. What politician is going to do that, barring an emergency situation? (Emergency is here defined as rioting, fuel rationing, or other severe measures.)

To be fair to our politicians, it’s hard to get elected telling people their lifestyle is going to change drastically, including many of them giving up their cars. The problem is partly cultural; we want what we want, and we’re going to keep electing politicians who give it to us until that is no longer possible.

And to be brutally honest, most of us have bought into the idea of unending growth and improvement, that the market will find solutions to concerns like oil depletion, and that if it were really that bad, somebody would do something.

At that point, we will be well into the emergency.

It has been difficult for me to give up on the idea of leadership from above. I ran federally as a Green Party of Canada candidate last go-round, but wouldn’t do it again. Even in the fantastic unlikelihood that the Greens got a majority next election, they could not do what needs to be done. Still too many people will resist change, and this resistance will be encouraged and financed – by vested interests.

Think Globally, Act Locally

As a result, I’ve gone local. Leadership is going to have to come from the grassroots, from us, from those who understand the reality and are willing to take some action. I believe that every village, town, city, and region should create a Transition Initiative to get off oil.

This is acting locally, and it is vitally important for your survival. Local resilience is ‘in,’ and for good reason. When oil prices go up, imports of everything – including food – are going to get more expensive and harder to get. If you’re already shopping at the farmer’s market, for example, you have helped support a local farmer who will now support you as options in the supermarkets get scarcer and pricier.

This is my new Wise Action Plan:

1. Start or join a Transition Initiative in your area.
2. Reskill.
3. Develop personal self-reliance, which includes everything from starting a garden to insulating your house.

If we’re lucky and good, these local movements will take off, multiply like viruses, and infect the planet. These local movements will bond together and require their governments to do the right thing – to protect us. They will do this not by lobbying or influence-peddling, but by sheer strength of numbers.

The purpose of this site is to find a ‘green’ lever big enough to move the world to sustainability. I titled it Go Green or Die because, well, that is true, we must, and becauseI thought it rather catchy.

That said, I have come to realise that people will not see climate change and peak oil as the crises they are unless and until a social tipping point is reached, where likely we will go from denial to near-panic. Various things can push us toward this tipping point; this site is my own small attempt, as are my The Way Home presentations, but we are not there yet and we are already late getting started on addressing these crises.

And that brings me to the main point. We cannot count upon governments or corporations – large organizations led by people with a strong vested interest in business-as-usual – to wake up and take action on climate change and peak oil in time.

I have come to accept this, and I won’t say I found it easy. I ran as as Green Party of Canada candidate in the last federal election, and as a Green Party of British Columbia candidate in the last provincial election. Clearly I recently thought that action at the national or provincial level was possible; I no longer think so.

It would be a long story to explain all my reasons why, but perhaps a small, real example will help illustrate. In the last provincial election, Lana Popham was one of my opponents as the NDP candidate. She seemed as ‘green’ as me; in talking with her, she clearly understood the threat posed by climate change. Her family runs an organic vineyard. She cycles everywhere.

I nearly withdrew to give her a clear run, but was persuaded otherwise. She won anyway. What has been the result? Her party formed the Opposition, and made her Agriculture Critic. The leaders of the NDP have her spending her time and energy and goodwill campaigning to get bicycles exempted from a new tax.

And that is just a tiny example of why change is unlikely to come from above. It rarely does, really; those entrenched naturally oppose change.

I came to realise that it is up to us. “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” as the song says. We must at least work to save local areas as best we can, to make them sustainable and self-reliant. Done alone, that will not ultimately stop or save anyone from climate change. It will only buffer against the coming oil shock and allow life to continue in a somewhat civilised manner.

The best route I’ve found so far is Transition Initiative, which every town and city and region should be doing. It’s a grassroots movement to make the local region more self-reliant, less dependent upon oil. There is no head office, no Executive Director. There are only guiding principles and local examples.

This is all a long way of saying that I’ve joined my local Transition Initiative. That is where the action is going to come from. The movement has caught on and has spread like wildfire, which gives me hope for wider action. It would be wonderful if ultimately there were thousands and thousands of Transition Towns, and these millions upon millions of people joined forces to end dependence on fossil fuels.

This journey has allowed me to create The Way Home presentation that ends on a positive, optimistic note. I was trained by Al Gore to deliver the An Inconvenient Truth presentation, which I did 40-or-so times to a few thousand people in total. One thing that always bothered me was the lack of realistic solutions offered. I don’t mean just the “Change your lightbulbs” ’solution,’ but even writing to your elected representative is largely a waste of time at this point.

Transition Initiatives do offer hope. I am going to re-do this site in the next few weeks to reflect the path we must take. Yes, we must ‘go green or die.’ But that message is not inspiring change. In an attempt to communicate the extent of the threat, it inspires fear.

What we need is the truth, which is that things are bad. We have not responded appropriately to warnings from experts, and we are going to pay a price for that. Ok, so what do we do? Reality must be faced, and realistic action must be taken. That is the focus of the Transition Initiative, and also of the new look of this site, which will become The Way Home.

Climate change is not a clear and present danger. It is clear to scientists, to those who take the trouble to understand the science, and to those who trust the former or the latter. It is not at all clear to anyone else, and of course the truth and danger are deliberately obscured by paid deniers.

Climate change is also not a present danger, meaning it is not an immediate threat. The longer we put off confronting climate change, the more damage it will do, but the nature of the threat is creeping and exponential. Some changes are occurring right now and many may realise that climate change is a contributory factor, but the danger is distant and remote. Later, as we go up the exponential damage curve, climate change becomes a clear and present danger but it will be too late to stop the worst.

Humanity does face a clear and present danger, however, and combating this crisis will go a long way toward fighting climate change. Environmentalists must not waste this crisis. Despite forty years of environmental activism and some major battles won, the war is all but lost.

If you want to win, it is time to change strategy. The crisis is peak oil, and is dead simple:

1. There is only so much oil;
2. At some point, the peak, we will have used half of all the oil;
3. After that point, there will only be less oil; and
4. Our entire civilisation, especially transportation and food, is dependent upon oil.
5. No substitutes are anywhere near available.

It doesn’t take a genius to realise that unless our need for oil remains less than the supply of oil, the price of oil is going to go up. Way up, given how dependent we are upon it.

From The Oil Drum

After the price of oil spikes, there will be a recession, and the price may come back down. That has been the pattern in recent recessions caused by oil price increases. This time, however, we have passed peak oil and that means the supply is less than it way – which means the price is not going to go down as much as it used to.

We are in a permanent recession as a result of the fact that oil prices are roughly four times what they were a few years ago. Because virtually 100% of our transportation – trucks, trains, planes, ships, and of course cars – runs on oil or its derivatives, the price of transportation has increased. The same effect exists with food, where pesticides are petroleum based, and of course tractors run on diesel. Inflation lately has been driven by these increases in transportation and food costs, and as people have to spend more on necessities like food and transportation, they will have less to spend on other things. This means less consumer demand and therefore a recession.

This recession is permanent and will probably deepen. Just prior to the recession, the price of oil spiked to $147 per barrel, and it is now approximately $80 per barrel. This is four times the price of only a few years ago, when the economy was booming. We are now in the worst recession since the Great Depression. The price of oil is not going down.

How does this recession fit into environmentalism? It is a crisis that will continue until we greatly reduce our demand for oil. Which, coincidentally and interestingly, is also a big part of the cure for climate change.

Climate change warriors need to get behind a plan to get off oil. The peak oil crisis is now, and people will respond. Whether they respond by invading another oil-bearing country, by dissolving into poverty and despair, or by conserving and moving to renewable energy is currently an open question.

Environmentalists, climate warriors, peak oilers, nationalists, and democratic reformers need to pile onto peak oil. The longer we delay, the more damage we suffer from recession, from peak oil, and from climate change. Replacing oil with conservation and renewables makes the nation energy-independent, creates a secure food supply, eliminates oil-induced inflation and recessions, and slashes greenhouse gas emissions.

Peak oil is a clear and present danger to the nation, to our prosperity, and to civilisation, and the protective steps for peak oil will greatly help with climate change. All of us need to join together to combat it.

I don’t mean the Paris Hiltons of the world, but her daddy and his cronies – the CEOs, executives, and politicians – the rich and powerful. These people are the modern aristocracy. They have the most to gain in the short-term from the status quo, from maintaining that the current course is the ideal, and by claiming that only their compass is capable of pointing True North. Further, they have the money and connections to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions, up to a point. They are thus strongly motivated to believe what they want to believe and to ignore reality.

The common man is not so isolated from consequences and has less motivation to believe that the rich know best, so those at the top must employ ‘think tanks’ to tell the little people what to think. Not surprisingly, what think tanks spout frequently coincides with what the rich want everyone to think.

John Kenneth Galbraith, the famous economist, noted the tendency of executives to be most psychologically committed to the rightness of the corporate vision – they have to be in order to attain their position. For example, if you accept that human-caused climate change is a problem, you’re very unlikely to become Chief Executive Officer of an oil or coal or auto company. The opposite is true:

• Example #1: Bob Lutz is the product development chief and Vice Chairman at General Motors. Mr. Lutz recently called global warming a “total crock of sh*t,” but then went on to claim that his views had no bearing on GM’s commitment to build environmentally friendly vehicles. Uh huh.
• Example #2: Rex Tillerson is the CEO of ExxonMobil. Mr. Tillerson argues that “the science of climate change is far from settled and that his company views it as its “corporate social responsibility” to continue to supply the world with fossil fuels.” Fuels that, according to scientists, are destroying the world. Interesting view of “social responsibility.”
• Example #3: Don Blankenship is the CEO of Massey Energy, a coal company engaged in mountaintop removal mining and violator of the Clean Water Act no fewer than 12,000 times. Mr. Blankenship recently tweeted that “Some fear that we are entering a new Ice Age. We must demand that more coal be burned to save the Earth from global cooling.”

Presumably these executives do listen to their own scientists when it comes to issues like engine designs, efficacy of oil extraction rates, and so on. They are not opposed to science in general, simply to science that reveals that their business model is flawed, or that their prestige, power, and money results from doing harmful things. They have a psychological blind spot – a fatal flaw.

The idiocy of the modern aristocracy is not immediately fatal for those at the top. You may have noticed that they are not suffering much, so may question just how dangerous it is to be stupid and rich. The sad reality is that their flaw is fatal for us. In a prime example of this dangerously gross idiocy:

• Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency and formerly an OPEC employee, admits that their projections of remaining oil supply are based on wishful thinking. The IEA, which every government in the world relies upon for oil forecasts, had never actually measured how much oil remained until 2008.

The fantastic stupidity of this is mind-boggling to average people. Perhaps if one is paid hundreds of thousands per year, jets around the world on a plush expense account, and looks good in a $1,000 suit, one can find a way to make sense of the senseless. That Mr. Birol gets all this while being so incredibly dumb is a sure sign that idiocracy has arrived in the aristocracy. That Mr. Birol has multiple degrees means nothing; very intelligent people frequently do very stupid things. Because oil is so vital to our civilisation, Mr. Birol’s foolishness is going to cost us very dearly. Heck of a job, Birol.

And that is the true tragedy of allowing morans at the top. They are leading us all to destruction.

I’m sure s/he must be asking itself the same question at this point, given what we’ve done to the planet. I suspect it was boredom. After 65 million years of the dinos, God had had enough. S/he needed something new, fresh, exciting to rejuvenate its creative energy. After awhile it must have been like having the fish tank screen saver on your computer. Very cool…but for 65 million years? So, fire a meteor into the earth, presto-blammo, dino-die-off, now taking applications for new species or new variations on old species. Must be creative, like Me.

Now, after only 1 million years, humans have developed the capability to kill God, or any concept of the sacred, both figuratively and literally. We are destroying the planet, which is our source of life, because to us no life is sacred, every life has a price or a use for someone else. The dinosaurs lasted 65 million years and it took a meteor to wipe them out. We’ve been around 1/65th of the time and are wiping ourselves out. Who had the tiny brain, again?

Life is sacred, not just mine but yours, too. I have no right to kill or exploit you in order to enhance my own life. And you will similarly respect me or I reserve the right to defend myself by whatever means necessary. When capitalism or communism or fascism or any other ‘ism’ permits this exploitation, that system is immoral, destructive, and ultimately self-destructive.

This basic truth, that life is sacred, has been lost, killed, sold.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us?
– Friedrich Nietzsche

As we lose respect for others, and for that which created and sustains us, so we lose respect for ourselves, and we decay into moral lassitude, on a path to destruction but too drunk to care.

Not everybody is like this, of course. There are many people more aware of reality, and more moral. I believe the vast majority of people contain an innate degree of conservatism, meaning our natural preference is to move slowly and cautiously forward. That’s our history; generation after generation saw little change.

And when changes did come, often they were bad. A new oppressor, perhaps. Invasion. Some mysterious disease.

As a result, most of us fear change. We were bred to maintain the status quo. Unfortunately, much as we fear change we fear not to reproduce, and inevitably this puts a civilisation in a predicament. So far, no civilisation has escaped this predicament, and now it is our turn.

However, we have something no previous civilisation had: we know that they existed, and roughly what happened to them.

We also know how to avoid the predicament: live sustainably. Live within the limits set by God and nature, and you and your heirs will prosper. Destroy that which God and nature have provided, and barren will be your earth.

I deliberately phrased some of this article in Biblical-sounding prose to remind us of where most of us got our first concept of the sacred: in a church or synagogue or mosque or some holy text. Those with an allergic reaction to the word of concept of ‘God’ may be offended; that is their choice. I was once that way, but it doesn’t make sense to throw away the lessons of the past, including moral teachings, because one doesn’t like the source.

We have killed God and put The Almighty Dollar in its place, and we have the morals to match. We have embraced the Seven Deadly Sins and made them virtues. Prudence and thrift and “waste not want not” are quaint relics that we believe are better replaced with Greed is Good.

There is a part of all of us that understands the concept of the sacred, and thus worships life. Spiritual leaders like Jesus and Gandhi sought to get us to expand that consciousness to other aspects of our character, to other people, even animals.

Jesus shielded the prostitute and kicked over the tables of the money-lenders; we do just the opposite. We judge harshly those we fear, like prostitutes and drug dealers, to evade the reality that we go much easier on crooked CEOs and banksters because we benefit from the system they represent. We are complicit in our own entrapment.

We can avoid the predicaments of overpopulation, resource scarcity, pollution, peak oil, and even natural climate change like ice ages by simply living sustainably. For example, if we know that large areas of the earth get covered by ice every 20,000 years, we don’t put billions of people in those areas.

That would be planning ahead. This, by the way, would have kept us to a much smaller population centred around the equator, except for the Inuit. Of course, we didn’t really figure out the cycles of the ice ages until fairly recently and we had already carved up the planet into nations by that point. But at least we could agree that countries affected by the ice age need to plan accordingly, and as some of them are likely to disappear entirely (like Canada and the Scandinavian countries, for example) they should start planning for their demise. Preferably by attrition, meaning to let the population naturally decline to zero sometime in advance of the ice age.

The situation described is roughly the reverse of the one we do face under climate change, with the countries close to the equator likely to be wiped out and the northern ones – well, benefitting from warmer and shorter winters, but starting to pay the price from wild storms, wildfires, and water shortages that are going to get much worse soon.

But we don’t think 20,000 years ahead, and we don’t think even 100 years ahead now. Many of us think in very short terms indeed: executives quarterly, workers paycheque-to-paycheque; our houses are built to last 70 years. No need to worry about any signs of them being around come the ice age.

We don’t even consider our children’s future any more. Nothing is sacred. We consume everything and leave nothing for our children, not even hope. What kind of parents are we? Our family lines deserve to die out.

We don’t have to end this way. We can rediscover the sense of sacred within ourselves. And we must exert our right to restrain those who would harm that which is sacred: life; creation itself.

There’s a lot being said about climate change, peak oil, and other looming catastrophes. Let’s be honest, none of these is helpful and all are potentially dangerous to life as we know it. Some years ago I moved from climate sceptic/denier to climate change warrior, after I investigated and discovered the reality of the threat. Corruption in the financial markets and in our democracies is also quite dangerous, as we have experienced in the current recession caused by crooked bankers and their bought politicians. But where climate change is a long-term threat, and we can stagger along for some time bearing the weight of the banksters, only peak oil looks very likely to deal a mortal blow soon.

Let’s go through these threats one-at-a-time.

Climate change

In brief, we are adapted to this climate, meaning everything from our agriculture to the countless cities at sea level, and any significant change is potentially catastrophic. Many vital crops stop growing above certain temperatures, and even the small amount of climate change we have seen so far is causing droughts and crop failures. A sea level rise of 1m (~3 feet) will displace 100 million people – and the latest projections are for a sea level increase of that magnitude this century. If temperatures rise sufficiently, and we are not doing anything to stop it, most of humanity and most species will be wiped from the face of the earth.

But devastating as climate change will ultimately be, it is not an immediate threat to us personally or to civilisation. (If you live in one of the developing countries, this is not true; bad things are happening now. The slaughter in Darfur was caused in part by the drying up of Lake Chad, which in turn was partly caused by global warming.) The major damage is expected to begin in 40-50 years, as displaced people move into crowded areas and turf wars begin, as water becomes in short supply and water wars begin, as many people realise their lives are going to be destroyed and they get angry about it.

Still, we are wired to respond to immediate threats that we can experience with our senses, and climate change has not passed that threshold yet for most people. They might be able to grasp the danger if it was presented graphically and if there were not paid fossil fuel company shills spreading misinformation and lies.

Pollution

Here I’m going to lump in everything from ocean dead zones (caused largely by excess agricultural chemicals) to acid rain to the hole in the ozone layer. All are bad news and contribute to the breakdown of the web of life that sustains us. Some we have actually taken constructive action on. None of the remaining are immediate threats, nor will be perceived as such.

While cancer rates and the number of children with asthma are believed to be directly tied to pollution, neither threatens to cause a mass collapse or revolt.

Overpopulation

Population becomes overpopulation when that population lives unsustainably. Population overshoot is certainly fatal; it has brought down civilisations in the past that exceeded the carrying capacity of their local environment. It is also a very sneaky problem, because everything can appear fine one year followed by utter collapse and a die-back the next year. There is a famous and chilling story of reindeer on St. Matthew Island that illustrates this. No doubt the ‘denier’ reindeer were saying right up until the end, “Everything is going great! Our population continues to expand, and our GDP (in the form of new reindeer, moss eaten, and poop produced) has just set another record!”

In our case, we have exceeded the ability of the entire Earth to support us, at least in the manner we currently live. We are burning through ‘natural capital’ to keep the party going; we are like the person who appears to be living the high life but in reality is financing it all on credit cards. Sooner or later, the credit is gone and the bills come due.

Many have said that the ‘real problem’ we face is simply too many people: If there were only 100 million humans, we could all live like Americans. However, there are 6.5 billion of us and population is expected to peak at 9 billion around 2050, assuming one of the other limits mentioned in this article doesn’t slow us down first. The real problem is that we are living beyond our ecological means and this has caused most of the other problems.

Resource Scarcity

We are burning through the finite resources of the earth at a fantastic rate and in very short-sighted ways. We expend enormous amounts of energy to dig up various metals, for example, use much more energy to make them into something useful to us – and then re-bury them. Again, though, except for one particular resource, none of the lithium or uranium or topsoil or other natural capital we are drawing down is going to bring civilisation to a crashing halt soon.

Peak Oil

This brings us to oil, that one ubiquitous resource without which our civilisation will end abruptly, and most of us will live much diminished and shorter lives. The reason is that oil is literally in everything in one form or another; our society is utterly dependent upon it. Our food is utterly dependent upon it.

Once we have extracted half of all available oil, rather obviously supply begins to decrease. A reduction in supply means an increase in prices, and because demand is rising, those price increases are going to be sharp and devastating. There was a pre-recession spike up to $147 per barrel, and the price now sits around $80 per barrel, or four times what it was just a few years ago.

It appears that we have hit peak oil, or will very shortly. It had to happen at some point; there was only so much oil.

Because demand for oil is increasing while supply is decreasing, the price of everything containing oil in any form – which is virtually everything – will rise. And because oil is fundamental to our civilisation, any reduction in supply must either be replaced in some way or accompanied by a scaling back of civilisation. As there are no viable replacements for oil and because we have not taken steps to ‘get off oil,’ there is going to be a nasty crash that few will escape.

Fear

Let’s get one thing out of the way up front: pointing out real threats is not scaremongering. Crying wolf is OK if there really is a wolf. Riding across the region warning people “The British are coming!” is the right thing to do if it’s true. And if climate change, peak oil, and other problems are real, then only a fool calls facing up to reality scaremongering.

Fear will not kill us. It can paralyse us, but that would be no different than our current state, in which we are not responding to legitimate threats. Fear can also galvanise us to action. If you see a bear charging toward you, fear would be a normal and even useful reaction as your body is flooded with fight-or-flight hormones.

Right now we face multiple crises but we dismiss them as problems. Climate change really is that bad. We are consuming the finite resources of the earth and shitting out pollution into our air, our water, and our soil. we have built our civilisation on oil and have not prepared to live without it. Consequences are to be expected. And while some people see this, many do not.

Fear is a legitimate emotion to feel when one looks at the future for your children – even for yourself. If peak oil is now, could this recession be due to high oil prices? Could this be a permanent recession because the price of oil is only going up from now on?

Peak oil has begun and we have not prepared at all. We should rightly be feeling angry at those who have deceived us about the dangers we face, and at our supposed leaders. They have betrayed all of us.

We need to begin a crash program to ‘get off oil’ immediately. We are in a predicament, which is different from a problem because problems have solutions. Predicaments may not. Turn your fear into anger and do something useful with it.

We face a legitimate crisis: the end of the age of oil.

Suggested books if you want to learn more

You would be wise to educate yourself about the reality of these problems. Do not take the word of politicians or talking heads, many of whom are paid by vested interests like the oil companies. Don’t believe me, for that matter, until you do your own investigation back to original, i.e., scientific, sources. I am confident that when you do, you will agree that I am representing reality fairly.

The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age well describes the problem of peak oil, which is our most pressing threat.

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines (New Society Publishers) discusses the realities mentioned above, namely that as a result of living unsustainably we now face shortages: peak oil, peak fish, peak topsoil, and so on.

Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming is an in-depth, impeccably sourced dissection of the lies spewed by vested interests to protect their profits at everyone’s expense.

Happy reading. If you don’t know, you cannot prepare. And if you are not prepared, your chances at surviving a downturn, setback, or collapse of any sort are greatly diminished.

Peak oil means that we have used half of all the available oil on the planet. From that point forward, oil will become scarcer, harder to extract – and more expensive.

Peak oil wise men say to expect oil price volatility with an overall upward trend. Consider these signs:

• The spike to $147 per barrel in October 2008, just before the banksters crashed the economy
• The price of oil is ~$80 per barrel in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, or 400% more than it was just a few years ago.

Note that there were recessions after the oil price spikes in 1973 and 1979.

The suburban foreclosure rate is higher than the urban rate, attributed to transportation costs which are 17% of the average American’s income, undoubtedly higher for many suburbanites commuting from work to Wal-Mart to McMansion in an SUV. The suburban foreclosure rate is a probable consequence of peak oil.

There will be other consequences, too. If the wise peak oil folks are again correct, we can expect:

• Modern agri-business dependence on oil means food prices will increase
• The increasing cost of transportation will cause everything, and especially imports, to rise in price

I have predicted that the outcome of these two is that our current recession is permanent. With food, transportation, and other costs permanently higher, there will be a reduction in overall employment because more of the family budget will go to these necessities.

Offsetting this drop in employment to an unknown amount will be new farm jobs (at very low pay) and likely a throttling of immigration.

Learning more about peak oil

The following sites are excellent on the subject of peak oil:

• The Oil Drum: Discussions about energy and our future
• Future Scenarios: Mapping the cultural implications of peak oil and climate change
• The Archdruid Report: Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society

There are also some great books that explain peak oil and its consequences clearly:
James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century pretty much sums it up.

Kunstler has also written a novel, World Made by Hand, in an attempt to convey what it would be like for those living in a post-peak oil world.

John Michael Greer’s The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age also does a great job explaining peak oil and why we don’t see it: we have all bought into the myth of unending progress, rather than accepting that much of our progress has come by burning oil.

The Oil Drum is one of the best resources on the web for keeping up-to-speed on peak oil’s progress and ramifications. The site also lists several “Peak Oil Primers,” and amusingly ranks them on a DEFCON scale. The DEFCON scale was designed to indicate the activation level of the U.S. military, with DEFCON 5 being “normal peacetime military readiness” all the way up to DEFCON 1, which signals an “imminent or ongoing attack.”

Having spent some time on each of those sites, I can say that they all predict very bad outcomes as peak oil progresses. TOD’s DEFCON rating appears to come from the optimism a site has about avoiding the worst of these outcomes, and how far along we are. I think it is fair to say that Kunstler and Savinar think sliding down the razor’s edge is unavoidable.

Where would you rate yourself? Do you think we still have time to develop alternatives, that peak oil has not yet arrived, that its impact will be slow and we can adapt? Put yourself at DEFCON 5, the lowest rating. Think like Kunstler and Savinar, that there are going to be significant casualties and a big chunk of civilisation will be lost? You’re at DEFCON 1. Or perhaps you’re somewhere in-between.

Personally, I stand at Defcon Zen. What is will be, and we do what we can.

I see us as just on the edge of the first step down of our punctuated decline; we’re in Greer’s first crisis. He predicts that such crises, which include economic depressions, typically last 10-25 years. During the crisis period, we are adapting to a lower availability of energy, and must scale back our civilisation accordingly.

I figure the current recession will deepen and many people will become permanently unemployed. There are millions who will simply have to find other ways to get by, or “make other arrangements” as Kunstler says, because there just won’t be jobs for everyone. In this first crisis, though, I think there will be ways for most who want to, to get by.

Conservation and local gardens have great potential to slash individual energy and food costs and energy use very quickly. They also cut the need for income. I think local responses will spring up, like local farms reviving and suddenly being profitable, as they no longer have to compete with subsidised imports.

While this means most people will eat more locally-grown and in-season food, it also means the price of food will rise. That means people have less money for everything else, and that means higher unemployment.

There are currently many farm jobs filled by migrant workers and immigrants, legal and not, and there will be great pressure to throttle immigration. I think the developed countries will have to stabilise their populations, whether they like it or not, within this crisis. Americans and Canadians will need the jobs, and will pick fruit and harvest vegetables, like it or not.

This counters the rise in unemployment to an extent as yet unknown, although the wages will be low. And so it goes, spiralling slowly down until we reach some sort of equilibrium where we can sustain a certain lifestyle, either sustainably if we’re wise, or temporarily if we’re not. In the first case, we can begin to rebuild. In the second, there will be a partial recovery and many will think good times are just around the corner, but in reality another step down awaits.

The crisis has begun; it’s going to get worse before it gets better – and it may not get better. Or, it could be an improvement on what we have in many ways. We could make a big shift to living sustainably, to implementing a zero-waste society – waste not, want not – and end up with walkable communities, net-zero energy solar houses, and a pretty decent standard of living. Fewer electronic geegaws, though.

How we respond is unknown as we proceed down this first slope. So far, there has been precious little action and disaster seems certain. But it’s a bumpy ride down, and we may wake up at any point during this first crisis. Once awake, there are wise courses of action to take, ones that lead us to a sustainable future so that this is the last crisis, and there are other courses that merely bring on another step down.

I suspect part of what wakes people up will be the ongoing devaluation of their homes. More and more people will be “underwater” and the banks will simply have to take a writedown in some way. If not willingly, there will be unignorable public resistance.

An oil war in the Falklands would be a shock, too. It would sure look like an Imperial Power siphoning off a resource from a developing country. The issue has already united Latin America. The potential for a war between the United Kingdom and Latin America could jolt people awake.

Or something could trigger a very rapid and deep decline, such as Saudi Arabia cutting back on supply significantly, regardless of the reason. War. Terrorist act. A recognition that their oil fields are in decline plus a sudden desire to use their oil to build a post-oil economy, leaving much less for export. Then it wouldn’t matter how ‘awake’ people were; the descent to a lower level will be rapid.

There is no way to know what it will take to wake humanity from its slumber, or if that is possible, and what the response would be. Given these unknown and at present unknowable variables, it only makes sense to take a Zen approach. Well, what to me is a Zen approach, given that I know very little about Buddhism:

• A good future is possible
• Wake people up
• Save my own soul

The first two I have already covered: A decent future is possible but only if people wake up and take a sustainable course of action. That is the purpose of this site.

The soul, whatever it may be, is only alive that anyone is aware as long as the body is alive, so if you want to save your soul then save your body. I am doing my best to acquire skills that will be valuable during the crisis, to ensure I have a secure place to live, a garden, a protective community, and so on.

We are entering a new and challenging era. There will be much that can be learned, many things rediscovered. It can be good or it may be bad, but ultimately we each must make the best of whatever time and circumstances we have.

Suggested books if you want to learn more

The books below discuss in much more detail some of the ideas mentioned in this post.

The first book is James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. Kunstler explains why peak oil is imminent and a problem.

The second book is John Michael Greer’s erudite explanation of peak oil and the expected outcome.

The third book is about a growing local movement to “Transition Towns,” and offers a positive vision and hope that we can make a difference locally, as our federal and state governments are not leading.

The final book is about growing your own vegetables year-round in a solar greenhouse, something we might all want to look into.

Peak oil has been explained in great depth in many places with solid supporting information. I have referenced some of those books and websites at the end of this post. Here, I will do my best to explain what peak oil is and what it means for you and us, in a dead simple manner.

What is peak oil?

The concept of peak oil is very simple: The earth has a certain amount of oil (and other fossil fuels). No more is being made. Peak oil occurs when half of this oil has been used.

It is a peak because, from that point forward, there will be less oil available. We appear to have hit the peak.

What will be the effects of peak oil?

The effects of peak oil are quite deadly and easy to understand once you realise how dependent our society is upon oil:

1. Our entire society is built on readily available and inexpensive oil. Essentially every car, transport truck, train, ship, and aeroplane runs on oil. (Or gasoline, diesel, or some other derivative of oil.) Almost all farming requires oil for fuel and for agro-chemicals like pesticides and fertilizers. All plastic is made from oil. All mining requires oil-fueled machinery, including tar mining to get more oil.
2. Demand for oil is increasing as countries like China develop.
3. As the demand for oil collides with a decreasing supply, oil prices will spike. These spikes cause recessions.
4. In addition to oil price spikes, oil prices will trend upward, causing a permanent recession, or more likely, a depression.

There you have it; peak oil is simple and deadly.

What about substitutes?

There are no substitutes available for oil in the quantities our modern economies require. Period. Remember all those vehicles, from tractors to trucks to mining equipment? None run on electricity or hydrogen or anything except oil.

Further, nor will any substitutes become available in time to replace declining oil supplies. (There is some debate whether this would be correct if a crash program was undertaken to radically cut oil demand, such as by rebuilding the rail system, moving to local, organic farming, and so on. At the current time, we are moving very slowly indeed; there is no crash program in sight, so the point is moot.)

But, but…the market?

A special word here is needed about ‘the market.’ Many believe that the market will produce non-oil-fueled ways to mine ore, to create pesticides, to run a global economy where items commonly travel thousands of kilometres before reaching their final destination. Do not put too much faith in the market.

First, it is not magic, it is simply a rough aggregation of our desires, and those are influenced by everything from advertising to legislation. Second, there is no such thing as a free market. It has been warped by corporations seeking advantage for their business. This is why General Motors bought and ripped out streetcar tracks, why GM had an electric car twenty years ago and scrapped it, and why GM received a multi-billion-dollar bailout recently.

Even without this corruption of the market, simply living in a complex society is going to result in distortions, intentional or not. Building the interstate highway system in the United States put railroads, which are far more fuel-efficient at transporting goods and people, at an economic disadvantage from which they have never recovered. Building all those roads also enabled the rise of subdivisions, now being foreclosed upon.

As oil prices increase, this will certainly drive non-oil-fueled methods of getting things done. However, remember that oil price increases also cause recessions, resulting in less money available for research and new programs. In addition, those who benefit from high oil prices will continue to resist alternatives and demand higher subsidies for themselves. Worse, unemployed and hungry people are likely to be angry, leading governments to take the easy route and subsidise the old way as long as possible, rather than doing what must be done: abandon it and move quickly to a conserver, zero waste, renewable energy economy.

Suggested resources if you want to learn more

Lester R. Brown has proposed a detailed plan to survive peak oil and stop climate change. It is available for free download or can be purchased.

The following sites are excellent on the subject of peak oil:

• The Oil Drum: Discussions about energy and our future
• Future Scenarios: Mapping the cultural implications of peak oil and climate change
• The Archdruid Report: Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society

The suburbs are going bankrupt faster. An NRDC paper has revealed that there is “a direct link between “location efficiency”—a measure of the transportation costs in a given area—and mortgage foreclosure rates.”

In other words, people who live in the ‘burbs are more likely to lose their houses to foreclosure than those who live closer to work and services.

Jon Commers of the Star Tribune cites this reseach in his excellent article, but nowhere does he mention peak oil. He talks all around it; for example:

If access to parts of our region is contingent on cheap, subsidized gas prices, people who buy property are exposing themselves to changes in those prices. If many homeowners in one area do so, the effects can be brutal for neighborhoods.

The foreclosure wave serves to highlight how households, local and state governments are all leveraged by development that relies on cheap, distant commutes to workplaces and services. As we’ve relearned in recent years, leverage works just as swiftly in reverse as it does moving forward.

Excellent points, but missing the key connection that, under peak oil, those neighbourhoods and developments that rely on “cheap, distant commutes to workplaces and services” are never coming back.

This also distinguishes the current recession from previous downturns; this one is not temporary. Oil prices are up, they’re going to trend upward, and this is going to increase the price of almost everything, including necessities like food and transportation – resulting in fewer jobs.

What does this means for housing prices in general?

• Houses requiring “cheap, distant commutes to workplaces and services” are going to decline in value as gas prices go up; i.e., the price of suburban houses is inversely proportional to the price of oil
• Tipping points will be passed in individual subdivisions – have been passed in some cases – where so many houses have been abandoned (and stripped and squatted in and vandalised) that all houses in the area lose essentially all value
• The former subdivision dwellers must move into town, which you might think would increase rents and prices – but these are unemployed people who have just lost their house; they’re broke; large numbers of unemployed people moving into neighbourhoods is considerably more likely to decrease house prices in that area than otherwise

The NRDC paper contains the remarkable statistic that

transportation costs…[consume] roughly 17 percent of the average American household’s income.

In other words, create walkable communities and the four-day work week is here. Which we will need, as there are going to be many fewer jobs to go around.