Apologies for recent infrequent posting. I’ve been working mainly on two things:

1. That “Get a free house idea” mentioned in a previous post. I may have an opportunity to be a developer/builder, which would get me that mortgage-free solar house.
2. The Way Home book and presentation. The presentation is in the works for April at the University of Victoria, and New Society Publishers (many of which books should be on your reading list) wants to see the manuscript for the book.

These two things have been consuming much of my time! I will be back soon; first article up will likely be on why what was previously considered a middle class lifestyle is now not possible for most people.

Brian

Here is the ideal post-collapse (meat) meal.* For future hunter-gatherers, here’s an easy meal when you just want to warm yourself around an open fire on a cool spring evening, drinking some mead and laughing with family and tribe. (Update below with recipe in English.)

My wife and family are from Colombia, which means that my wife’s mother retains memories of and skills from a more self-reliant age. She can turn milk into cheese using only the sun and a powder called “Milkset,” for example. And every now and again, my wife, who has the memories but not the skills, because like most of us in the developing world, her generation never had to use them, still occasionally goes back to her roots.

This dish – Lomo al trapo – likely has very old roots. It’s the sort of thing people have been cooking for thousands of years, because the requirements are simple: cloth, string, fire, beer, salt, hunk of meat.

The instructions below are in Spanish below (here’s the original), but essentially here’s how it goes:

1. Lay out a square of cotton large enough to wrap a hunk of meat.
2. Spread 1 kg of salt over the cloth.
3. Soak another cloth in beer and lay it over the first.
4. Put the meat in the middle, wrap it up and tie it.
5. Cook for approximately 30 minutes per side over an open fire.

I can imagine people cooking this back in the middle ages and even much further back for a small feast.

It looked delicious, and I’m told it was. (As a vegetarian, I didn’t partake in the meat portion of the meal.)

* If you’ve read other articles on this site, you’ll know that I normally write about what we can expect in a future of declining oil supplies, climate change, and worse-than-useless leaders.)

Lomo al trapo

UPDATE: Lomo al Trapo – Beef Tenderloin in Cloth (English recipe)

Comensales: 6
País: Colombia
Tiempo de preparación: 15 mins
Tiempo de cocción: 40 mins
Tiempo total: 55 mins

Preparación:

El lomo debe ser bien fino, largo y sin nervios o grasa.
Mojar el trapo de algodón y cubrirlo con un kilo de sal; colocar el lomo en el centro, y cubrirlo con el resto de la sal. Cerrar bien la tela, cuidando de que la carne quede bien cubierta de sal; superponer los bordes largos y doblar hacia adentro los extremos. Atar muy bien con hilo de cocina, ajustando cada 5 cm. para evitar que se escape la sal.

Colocar en la parilla, cuidando de que las brasas no quemen la tela; cocinar por 8 minutos de cada lado, si le gusta bien jugoso. Si no, extender el tiempo de cocción a 10 minutos para término medio; y 12, si lo desea bien cocido.

Al voltearlo, se nota que la sal se solidificó por efecto del calor. Para retirar la carne, hay que romper esta capa de sal, y quitar bien con un cuchillo lo que puede haber quedado sobre el lomo, el cual debe estar seco por fuera y tierno por dentro.

Capital punishment in the United States (the only developed country still executing people) is expensive and error-ridden. The cost is primarily due to the appeal process, something third world countries don’t bother with. We can (and should) debate the legitimacy of capital punishment – but not here. In this article, I simply wish to point out that only wealthy countries can afford to eliminate capital punishment.

There are crimes I would favour the death penalty for, especially when keeping ourselves safe from someone who did something truly heinous and who is clearly guilty. Not beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond doubt. Certain serial killers, torturers, mass murderers, and so on. I would consider it acceptable, but that the state cannot be trusted with the power to kill people. It would be only a matter of time before people were being executed for political reasons. In the United States, blacks are executed at a rate nearly four times that of whites, especially by elected judges in election years.

However, we are entering a time (due to a permanent recession induced by peak oil) when a greater proportion of our resources will be required to support the incarcerated. Prisoners will become more of a burden on the rest of us, and there will be pressure to reduce that burden.

Non-fun Facts About Incarceration

In Canada, the cost to incarcerate a male prisoner is more than $87,000 per year, and a female prisoner costs $150,000-250,000 annually. Incarceration costs approximately $259 per day, while alternatives like probation and community supervision cost less than $25 per day.

The United States jails people at the highest rate in the world, and this combined with overcrowding enables economies of scale that result in a cost to incarcerate of $62 per day, or $22,650 per year.

These costs will become progressively more of a burden for a society struggling with ongoing recession.

Reducing the Prisoner Burden

One way to reduce the prisoner burden is to stop jailing people for victimless crimes, like using or selling small amounts of drugs. When society becomes poorer, then fewer people will be imprisoned because we stop jailing people for minor crimes. We may put them on probation, we may give them community service, but we won’t imprison them. And some current ‘crimes’ may cease to be soon.

Another way to reduce the burden is to execute certain prisoners and save ourselves the expense. Given the current cost of keeping someone on death row and then executing them, it would certainly seem more cost-effective to eliminate capital punishment. However, in poorer and more troubled times, there may not be so many avenues for prisoners to appeal, and the cost-to-execute versus the cost-to-warehouse may tip in favour of death.

The third way is to use the prisoners to do work for profit, as was done in the Soviet Gulags and Nazi concentration camps, and is done in American prisons. Not that I see anything wrong with prisoners working; quite the contrary. I think they should be growing and preparing their own food, making their own furniture and clothes, and otherwise minimising the burden to the rest of us. (And hopefully learning something useful and noncriminal while doing so.)

The corruption comes from working the prisoners for profit, because then an incentive is created to incarcerate more people for longer periods of time, and to criminalise things that will snare “them” but not “us.” It should come as no surprise that the American Republic has more people per capita in jail than any other country, and that most of these are poor people who cannot afford good legal representation. The system is working as designed, whether intentionally or accidentally.

In a poorer world, we simply won’t have the resources to imprison so many people – or to allow costly appeals processes. Protections for those sentenced to death are likely to slowly revert to third world levels, which saves money but certainly does not serve justice. Sentences for minor ‘crimes’ will either be eliminated, replaced with a lower-cost alternative like community service, or result in forced labour that is profitable for the prison owner.

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.

Ok, the short answer is no, because solar greenhouses are going to be powering someone’s commute anytime soon. However, they could just be a big part of the solution to heating homes, which makes up a very large part of total energy use and will take an increasing chunk of the family budget as oil prices increase. To those who say they will be unaffected because they don’t heat with fossil fuels, think again. Solar greenhouses could also be used to grow food, another major chunk of the family budget and also highly susceptible to oil prices.

In this solar greenhouse (not pictured), the homeowners spent $1,000 and their labour to create a simple but very effective solar greenhouse that reduced their heating consumption – for a 100-year-old, 1,800 square-foot* house in Wisconsin! – “…to less than one cord of firewood and about $50 worth of natural gas.” That is remarkable. If it can work there, it can just about anywhere.

This was no high-tech greenhouse, as you may have gathered by the cost, yet it was still highly effective:

All windows were single-glazed, and some of the recycled storm windows we used for glazing were cracked, yet we were able to maintain “frost hardy” vegetables, even with outdoor temperatures in the minus 30’s.

We were able to “harvest” heat from our greenhouse every day that it wasn’t actually snowing, as long as I kept snow from accumulating on the glazed portion of the roof.

With good circulation, the volume of air in a 9 x 30 foot greenhouse is great enough to keep an 1800 square foot house warm as long as the sun shines.

This, by-the-way, was in a house in the city.

Growing bananas in the Rockies

If we got serious about solar greenhouses, the heat return to the house could be increased and so could the varieties of vegetables – and fruits – grown. My personal goal is to have a solar greenhouse capable of growing avocados, as my wife and family are Colombian and love them. Of course, as avocados must be flown in they are expensive, contribute to climate change, and will likely be unavailable as oil prices rise significantly. I have the advantage of living in Victoria, Canada, so should be able to do so easily.

However, even people living in much colder areas of the country can grow tropical fruits in a solar greenhouse. The bananas in this photo are grown in Amory Lovins’ solar greenhouse in Colorado, which he describes as

…the “furnace” for the building. This 900-square-foot space, plus the heat gain from the other windows, lights, appliances, and people, provides all the heat that’s needed for the entire building most of the year.

The heat is stored in the masonry, the floor, the water, and the earth under the house. Because of the building’s huge thermal capacity, heat is stored for months, not just hours.

Heat captured in September may be used in December.

That is remarkable. The Lovins’ building is a much higher-tech solution than the Wisconsin $1,000 solar greenhouse, and has correspondingly greater capabilities. I hope we start investing in this kind of tech soon, or peak oil may leave us only with the low-tech, low productivity option; better than nothing by far, but no bananas.

All heating costs are tied to oil prices

I should close by addressing those who don’t heat with oil or natural gas (also in decline), and may believe their heating bill will be unaffected by rising oil prices. You will. As oil (and natural gas) prices increase, there will be a switch to electricity for everything from heat to cars, driving the price of electric heat up.

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* Note: I believe there is an error in the article when it states that the house contains nine bedrooms. I suspect this should be nine rooms, not nine bedrooms, as it is 1,800 square feet. However, it is possible.

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 (from left-to-right) is Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet – something the authors found a tremendous challenge. And they live in Vancouver, where far more can be grown than anywhere else in Canada. They found certain foods were simply no longer available, something that will also happen as oil prices rise. Here’s a telling quote from the book:

Call me naive, but I never knew that flour would be struck from our 100-Mile Diet. Wheat products are just so ubiquitous, “the staff of life,” that I had hazily imagined the stuff must be grown everywhere. But of course: I had never seen a field of wheat anywhere close to Vancouver, and my mental images of late-afternoon light falling on golden fields of grain were all from my childhood on the Canadian prairies. What I was able to find was Anita’s Organic Grain & Flour Mill, about 60 miles up the Fraser River valley. I called, and learned that Anita’s nearest grain suppliers were at least 800 miles away by road. She sounded sorry for me. Would it be a year until I tasted a pie?

The next 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 next two books discuss growing your own vegetables year-round in a solar greenhouse. The second also is recommended by the builder of the $1,000 greenhouse, and has instructions for building a solar greenhouse. It is out-of-print, but you can buy it used or borrow it from the library.

H2Oil opens with a dramatic aerial shot of the tar sands – which are awe-inspiring, but in a bad way, like watching a plague of locusts advance toward your crops. You just know it’s not going to end well. The tar mines are a massive sprawl of destroyed landscape populated by machines and the people who work them; otherwise not a sign of life. No trees, not even bushes or grasses. Certainly no animals; birds unfortunate enough to land in the tailing ponds are doomed.

H2Oil is really the ongoing story of men seeking money versus Canada’s First Nations, versus ‘the environment,’ versus anything that gets in the way of that money, including integrity. Guess who’s winning and who’s dying? It is one of 2009’s top documentaries and is a must-see for Canadians. H2Oil tells the story of the tar sands from four different perspectives: First Nations peoples, scientists and other experts, a couple running a bottled spring water business, and indirectly the government/business point-of-view. (For practical purposes, government and business are the same with respect to tar mining.)

It’s just business: Big Oil and Big Government

For businessmen, tar is gold. It’s a huge bonanza, and none of them care about the health effects because none of them live anywhere near it or have a functioning conscience. Same for government officials, and as the film points out, there is a revolving door between the Alberta government and Big Oil.

The Alberta Environment Ministry is located in Petroleum Plaza, and when Suncor employees hosted a public session in a town near the tar sands, they brought bottled water. And an Alberta Assistant Deputy Minister – with a straight face, no less – is on film spinning tar mining as a benefit because it removes the oil – a contaminant – from the land.

The federal government is no better; the film shows Prime Minister Harper comparing tar mining to building the Great Wall of China or the Pyramids. The subtle difference that those were creations and tar mining is destruction escaped him. And to be fair, the film also showed former PM Jean Chretien fully supporting the tar sands, and former PM Paul Martin. Not mentioned in the film, but current Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff is also a big fan.

Everyone else: Slow down

Rates of cancer are higher, possibly much higher, in the First Nations people living near the tar sands, but government and industry downplay the danger. When a local doctor raised concerns about the frequency of rare cancers in the community, he was silenced by the Canadian government.

Suncor’s (2006) own estimates showed that if people eat the moose, fish, berries, and so on from the region around the tar mines, an additional 312-453 cases of cancer per 100,000 would be expected. Alberta Health and Wellness (2007) claimed even that industry study was exaggerated and “only” 17-33 additional deaths per 100,000 would be expected. Normal, by-the-way, is 1 per 100,000. It is disturbingly reminiscent of the asbestos cover-up, in which the asbestos companies concealed death rates of workers – and continued practices known to kill.

Other experts have pointed out that all the vast tailing ponds leak toxic substances into the Athabasca river; government and industry minimise the effects. Tailing ponds are huge; a breach would result in a spill equal to 300 Exxon Valdez ships.

Same for water usage; business asketh for more water and the government giveth freely, regardless of long-term consequences.

Oh-oh Canada

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) commits Canada to proportional supplies of oil – and water – to the United States. Even if Canadians are freezing in the dark, we are legally obliged to continue to sell oil to the United States. The Orwellian-named Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) provides energy security for the United States, but not for Canada.

We are not an energy “superpower.”  We are an energy satellite.

Canada is pretty well the only country that has not set aside any oil for our own use, and we certainly have not been building a post-oil economy.

Up to 4 barrels of oil is used to produce one barrel of oil from the tar sands, and that oil produces three times the greenhouse gas emissions as extraction of conventional crude.

Fully half the Athabaska glacier has melted away. This glacier supplies the Athabaska river. Climate change is causing the glacier to melt. Climate change is, of course, accelerated by the burning of oil.

It makes my heart cry

One elder from a First Nations tribe, surveying the devastation brought by tar mining, said “It makes my heart cry.” All that was given to us is destroyed, he said, all for one thing – oil.

Another resident said that everybody is afraid to look at the impacts, because they may be so serious that we have to stop. And we just can’t afford to, because we haven’t made any serious attempt at building a sustainable economy.

H2Oil builds one particular theme throughout, and that is that people are getting fed up. “We have to take our power back,” said one Fort Chipewyan resident. Another said that if the the government breaks promises in a treaty, then the treaty is invalid and the First Nations will take their country back.

The sad reality is that international trade agreements move power from local stakeholders to remote moneymakers; it’s average people against guys in suits. Until local people take back their power, they will continue to die as a result of tar mining, Alberta will continue to be plundered and ruined, and Canada will continue the shame of destroying First Nations people for short-term profit.

Recommendation?

Not as gripping as An Inconvenient Truth or The Corporation, every Canadian should nonetheless see H2Oil. We need to know what is being done in our name to First Nations people and to Alberta. We need to understand the driving force behind Stephen Harper and Canada’s position on certain global issues.

For more information, check out Tony Clarke, author of Tar Sands Showdown: Canada and the New Politics of Oil in an Age of Climate Change. Clarke appeared in H2Oil.

Two other great reads on the topic are:

• Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent by Andrew Nikiforuk
• Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn’t Seem to Care) by William Marsden

We face a “punctuated decline” as oil supplies decline and prices increase. There will likely be an initial ’step down,’ followed by a partial recovery. In such times it is difficult to know what will provide a secure income. I have put the promising (and not-so-promising) fields first and the justification for the decline after, to spare those well aware of the reality we face.

UPDATE: It seems I’m in good company; The Atlantic Monthly just published the following article: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America.

This article covers the timeframe of the first step down and the first partial recovery. John Michael Greer, based on past civilisational collapses, estimates that each stage will last 10-25 years and that we are now taking our first step down; the crisis years have begun.

What jobs may offer some security during the first crisis of a punctuated decline, where that crisis may last 10-25 years? I have written other articles about career choices for an actual collapse, meaning the crisis is very severe, but this article addresses surviving and even thriving in the early crisis years. You don’t need to know how to make beef jerky out of roadkill for this step, although you will probably be better off if you can grow some of your own vegetables.

All the fields listed are, I believe, decent bets (you cannot do better than an educated guess at a probability) at being valuable during the first step down and the first partial recovery. After that, it’s anybody’s guess.

Depression-resistant Fields

First, forget the idea of a secure job; there is no longer any such thing and there will be no such thing in the future. There will, however, be opportunities.

OpenOffice consultant: I started with the unexpected for a reason; you need to think differently to thrive in today’s future. During an economic downturn that is seen as permanent, many companies, organizations, governments, and individuals are going to consider free software seriously. Microsoft Office costs $499; OpenOffice is free. Microsoft Windows 7 costs $299; Ubuntu is free. Adobe Photoshop is $699; GIMP is free.

People who are experts in these programs are likely to have opportunities to make money. Trainers, people to migrate data from Microsoft formats to OpenOffice formats, management consultants, and so on will be needed. Because most of this free software is open source, there is a good chance that governments and companies will pay for customisation, meaning jobs for developers. Not as many as Microsoft is currently employing, but some.

Green Energy: As oil prices go up, this field is going to explode. In reality, it has been growing at a fantastic rate only slowed recently by the recession; we don’t see it as much here in Canada and the U.S. because the field is still very small and it has not become the priority that it has in Europe and Asia.

To oversimplify, there are several, sometimes overlapping categories of green or greenish energy: small and large, simple and complex. All are likely to boom. Examples of simple include small wind turbines capable of supplementing a house (pictured below), or even a black, water-filled hose coiled on a roof to heat water. Examples of complex include solar PV and large wind turbines putting out megawatts. Complex alt-energy solutions require advanced manufacturing capabilities and often exotic materials – and very large investments. As a result, the simpler solutions are likely to be more resistant to severe collapse, but all will continue to grow during the first crisis as governments and investors throw money at alt-energy.

Green Investment: Facilitator or investor, if you can find or place investment funds in green energy and conservation, your dance card will be full. Governments will also be throwing money at green energy of all sorts, and may even mandate that existing energy companies – the oil companies that have been making record profits the last few years for example, may find themselves legally required to invest a much higher percentage of their income in alternative energy.

Conservation and Heating Contractor: The price of energy has nowhere to go but up. Even a crash program to install wind or nuclear or whatever your favourite energy source happens to be will not forestall this, and this is a major driver of the first step down. However, people will still need heat. The higher the price of energy, the more popular conservation is going to become.

People who can add insulation to homes will be in demand. So will anyone who can reduce – or even eliminate – heating costs. If you can build a solar greenhouse that adds significant heat to a house in the winter (and not in the summer), you’ll be in demand.

Heating is necessary if passive solar and insulation aren’t enough, as they will not be in most cases because we didn’t build with this in mind. You can’t add a solar greenhouse to a building that gets no sun. However, after insulating as well as can be done, heating can be made more efficient or more cost-effective.

On the large scale, district heating will rise in popularity as companies realise that their waste heat is a valuable resource and that waste becomes more costly. If you can facilitate this process, you can do well. On a more local scale, in many areas woodstoves are going to increase in popularity. An even better option could be a masonry heater (pictured), in which a short, hot fire produces enough heat and hot water for the day. (And, if a cooking oven is installed, can also be used to roast turkeys and bake bread.) It follows that people who own woodlots will have a product this will be in ever greater demand as the price of other sources of energy rises.

Mass Transit: There is almost certain to be a push for more mass transit during the first step down. More people will find driving to be an intolerable drain on their income, and with those who already cannot or do not drive will push powerfully for more and better transit options. This means more jobs making buses, streetcars, and related infrastructure, especially electric-powered. Even intercity rail is finally likely to get a boost as diesel prices and road maintenance costs go up, and government revenues and therefore subsidies to these industries (including provision and maintenance of roads and other infrastructure) decrease.

Low-cost Transportation: Our economy is global, meaning goods are made anywhere and transported everywhere. This works when transportation is inexpensive but will contract as transportation costs rise. As almost all transportation of goods and people is by oil-fueled carrier, cost of transportation is going to increase significantly. If you can provide a low-cost means of transportation locally, regionally, or internationally, you will have a booming business. For example, there is an enterprising group in France currently transporting their wine to England via old sailing ship; their energy cost is near-zero. Sail-powered or assisted vessels are going to come back into style even in this first step down.

Transporter: Not like the film, but of people and things. As driving gets more costly, delivery becomes a better option. Most grocery stores currently offer free delivery; many stores will have to offer delivery services, free or otherwise, if they want car-challenged people to buy their products. These same people will also be taking more taxis, although they will get expensive, especially the non-hybrids, just as personal driving will.

Local Manufacturing of Costly Necessities and Luxuries: Many imported items are going to get more expensive as transport costs go up, which will make local production more cost-effective. However, what gets made locally depends upon demand and trade laws (which will eventually be revised, but not likely immediately) so think necessities. Soaps of all sorts, for example, will always be wanted. So will alcoholic beverages. For example, I live on Vancouver Island, Canada, and currently a bottle of wine from Australia costs the same, sometimes less, than a bottle of comparable quality from local growers. Unless Australia is heavily subsidising their wine industry, then transportation must compose a very small part of the cost of a bottle of wine. This will not last; the only realistic way to get wine from Australia to Canada is by ship, and ships are only powered by oil, which is only going to increase in price.

Depression-susceptible Fields to Avoid or Abandon

Many fields are likely to see decline during this first step down. Auto dealerships and manufacturers are going to permanently contract, for example, as this first crisis results in fewer people driving. Electronic geegaws of all sorts are going to decline in sales and go up in price. During the first step down, there will be a lot of people making less than they did before, and also a significant number essentially permanently unemployed and getting by as best they can. Big screen TVs, Kindles, and Blu-Ray players will be low on their list of “must-haves.” That doesn’t mean these items will disappear, but that, like the auto industry, there will be a permanent contraction.

New home construction is never again going to reach the peaks it did during the bubble, so there will be fewer jobs for tradespeople, architects, and other jobs related to building. This is not all bad; in my area at least there are an awful lot of people who jumped into the construction field because it was booming, not because they were any good at it.

Justification: Watch that first step – it’s a doozy

Our economy is almost entirely built on cheap energy in the form of oil. There are whole books devoted to the subject; suffice it to say here that essentially all transportation and agriculture in the developed world would grind to a halt very quickly if the oil stopped. This is why the U.S. declared that they would defend their “national interests” in the Middle Eastern oil fields with force – and why they are.

Peak oil is going to cause a major ‘restructuring’ of the economy and quite possibly eventually a major collapse. Peak oil means the end of cheap oil, which our entire economy is built upon, as we have exhausted the most easily-recoverable – in terms of dollars and, more importantly energy – oil. This restructuring is likely to take the form of a long descent; according to Greer, we’re in for a “punctuated decline,” in which successive pieces of technology and civilisation are lost as more people become permanently unemployed and we cease to be able to do things we previously took for granted, due to the lack of cheap energy in the form of oil. I believe there is the potential (due to war, terrorist attack on Saudi oil fields, etc) for the descent to be quite rapid, but barring a trigger like this, I agree with Greer’s idea of a long stairway to a preindustrial state.

According to Greer, our long descent will proceed by periods of crisis alternating with periods of partial – never full – recovery. Each crisis takes us a step lower, each recovery fails to get us back where we were.

When oil prices rise, the economy contracts. If oil prices stay high, or actual shortages develop, the economy is very likely to stay contracted. And because there is a fixed amount of oil, once we pass the peak – the point at which roughly half the oil has been extracted – up goes the price. A price increase equals a shortage for those who can’t afford it, and as oil prices increase, there are going to be more people who are priced out of the market.

During a period of crisis, society and the economy undergo some reorganisation to respond to the new reality. When the price of oil goes up, or it becomes hard to come by, then individuals and companies figure out ways to use less, get subsidies, or go out of business.

Ultimately, we are very likely to have less-than-full economic recovery this time around. Energy prices are much higher and may spike again as soon as demand ramps up, which would limit any recovery. Further, there is a lot of debt and a great deal of economic chicanery passed off as wisdom that will also limit a recovery. When banksters feel sufficiently confident to skim off enormous bonuses during a recession they caused, you can trust that the political-economic table is rigged in their favour, and so they will continue to attempt to gobble up any money that comes available.

This means many of us will never return to working a full-time job, and many will see salaries decline significantly.

Usually the way this goes in recessions is that those with jobs do OK; they may not get a raise, but they also don’t see significant pay cuts. Even during the Great Depression, many remained employed throughout and some hired the desperately unemployed as servants. Job seekers see offered wages decline – this is already happening. Employers know they can get someone for less during a recession, but also know that recessions end and don’t want any employees hired during that time to feel overly discriminated against. They offer toward the low end of the scale, but still keep to the scale. During a prolonged recession or depression, however, the bottom of the scale drops. There is no foreseen end to the economic troubles, so employers aren’t constrained.

Resources for this article

“But our civilisation will never collapse!” you say. Well, every civilisation before ours has, often due to overextension militarily or environmentally, and we have done both. From left-to-right:

Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed describes the fall of previous societies and the lessons we should have paid attention to.

In the second and third books, James Howard Kunstler and John Michael Greer explain in depressing detail why peak oil leads to a decline of our energy-hungry civilisation, and why alternative energy is unlikely to rescue us.

The final book is an overview of alternative energy systems from solar hot water to wind, from wood to microhydro, and is from the venerable Mother Earth News.

What is natural and best for humans to eat is what we evolved with. You don’t get any longer or more reliable testing than that. Coming right after that are foods that we have eaten for many generations. Foods that are new to us are unnatural. Simple, right?

For example, genetically modified foods (GMO) may be doubleplusgood for you, or they may not, but eating them is still more risky than foods we have been eating for thousands of years.

Similarly, it is no surprise that “sugary soft drinks [are] linked to pancreatic cancer,” because they are hardly natural. We began drinking “sugary soft drinks” only fairly recently, so we should expect the side effects of doing so to select for those people who can handle the drinks better. Of course, this may take thousands of years, and in the meantime many of us will be selected out earlier than we otherwise would have gone.

This is one reason the European Union favours the precautionary principle, which states that the burden of proof for the safety of any new product is on the producer. The American government favours corporate interests and so the burden is on the consumer. The United States allows new products and chemicals to be ‘tested’ on the American people, and even passes legislation so Americans won’t know what’s in their food, so they won’t know they’re test animals.

Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) is a perfect example; Monsanto developed and promoted it as a way to increase milk production in cows despite their own very limited tests showing BGH caused problems in the cows and test animals is was given to. Monsanto then ‘arranged’ to have the U.S. government approve BGH and the Canadian government very nearly approve it, successfully pressured Fox News to keep a story about the safety of BGH off the air (getting two reporters fired in the process), and continues to lobby to make it illegal in some states to label milk as having come from cows given BGH. (As an aside, it was this same incident that resulted in the court agreeing that “Fox had no legal requirement to report the truth in a news story.” This same problem exists in Canada, where CBC’s The National Newhour’s Executive Producer informed me that “…it is not the CBC’s obligation to determine what is ‘truth’.”)

I digress. Anyway, claims can be made that certain new chemicals, foods, vitamins, and so on and so forth are an improvement on Nature’s attempts, but the proof is in our long-term health only – and that may take generations to be determined for those items that cause genetic defects. In the meantime, it makes sense to stick with “natural” foods.

What is Natural?

Natural is what we have evolved with. This applies not only to new foods and chemicals, but to age-old ones used in new ways. Steroids occur naturally in the human body; injecting or popping pills containing steroids is not new and can be dangerous. The previously mentioned BGH also occurs naturally, but stuffing cows with ‘extra,’ meaning more than their bodies make naturally, is new and therefore may have unintended and unpleasant consequences.

Milk is ‘natural,’ but yet many people cannot, or at least should not, be drinking it because they are lactose intolerant; they lack a necessary enzyme: “…among Asian populations it is almost 100%, among American Indians it is 80%, and among blacks it is 70%; however, among American Caucasians the prevalence of lactase deficiency is only 20%.” Milk is unnatural for these people, likely because people from these cultures or regions do not have a long history of drinking milk. To declare that “milk does a body good” is false for many people.

Organic foods are natural in the sense that humans have grown crops for eons without chemical fertilizers or pesticides. The usual comeback from supporters of industrial agriculture is that the crops don’t care whether their nitrogen comes from natural gas or from horse manure, it’s still nitrogen. Again, this may or may not be true. But certainly the health of the soil degrades badly when nitrogen-based fertilizers are used, and plants get many other things beside nitrogen from that soil. So given the choice, I would prefer to eat organically-grown foods so I know they contain whatever they’re ’supposed to.’

Microwaving foods for any reason is not natural, although I do it anyway on occasion. Microwave popcorn is about as far from natural as you can get without eating plastic directly; I still do that once-in-awhile, too. (While moderation is also normally good, there is no guarantee that even one instance of an unnatural event will not be fatal or harmful.)

Non-food Unnaturalness

Plastic is simply not natural, but humans have been wearing clothes made of cotton and other ‘natural’ fibres since we learned to weave. Given my druthers, I go for the natural fibres, untreated with wrinkle and stain-resistant chemicals, when I buy clothes. It’s probably not a big deal, but why take chances? And then I also help all the people involved in the production of the clothes, from farmers to factory workers, who don’t have to work with those chemicals.

New houses are often a stew of chemicals like formaldehyde, and that “new car smell” is carcinogenic. When I build my next and last house, it will be of a ‘natural’ material that we have been in close contact with for more generations than I can count. Highly allergic people often have to live in houses like this, and while thankfully nobody in my family has severe allergies, asthma, or chemical sensitivities, I can’t see where my body having to deal with these foreign substances day-in-and-day-out is healthier than not having to.

What to Eat?

Ultimately, what is natural is what we ‘grew up with’ as a species. We have been eating organic foods in season until very recently, so it’s a safe bet that organically-grown foods are the healthiest for us. If you come from a part of the world that has been vegetarian since before anyone can remember, then eating animal products is likely to cause you problems. If you eat anything and it consistently causes stomach upset or other problems – stop eating it. It’s not really that complicated.

Resources for this post

The first (from left-to-right) is Michael Pollan’s classic on food and whence it came. In the course of his research, for example, he discovered that 40% of American foods contain corn in one form or another. That’s not natural.

Second is the result of an investigation by a food journalist and chef into which foods, regardless of how grown, were best for personal and planetary health.

Third is the now popular movie Food Inc, and “examines the costs of putting value and convenience over nutrition and environmental impact.” It is well-worth watching.

The final book is available for pre-order and is due out in May (in English; it came out in French last year). The World According to Monsanto is a thorough investigation of one of the most evil corporations on the planet, exposing how their pursuit of profit comes well before anything else, including your health or that of farmers or the planet.

Most of us don’t fit into your convenient categories. I am, however, conservative, and liberal, and libertarian, and communitarian, and a social democrat. Everybody is right…partly. Nobody has the whole puzzle, but each group/ideology has a piece or two. Unfortunately, we have been effectively polarized into competing camps, so now each group is trying to force their ideology on the other rather than seeing the commonalities. Or even, hard to accept, I know, learning from each other, because none of them has “the” solution, although you would never know that from talking to them.

What I want, and what I think most Canadians and Americans want, is what works and what’s fair. I don’t care what your theory says if it doesn’t work or if it requires screwing people over. If it has been tried and failed, let it go. Politics is not religion, requiring blind faith in the unknown; we have lots of failed experiments to not repeat, and even a few successes. Take the pieces that work from each ideology and toss the rest.

Here are some of the useful core values of each group; I ignore the perverted values and logic that many people in each group have adopted.

Libertarians and Conservatives

There is a truth at the core of Libertarianism/Conservatism that we should all respect: Individuals have rights – this was the great truth that the Founding Fathers of the United States of America brought into the world. “We hold these truths to be self-evident….” Those truths were not at all self-evident to most people at the time, but thanks to the example set by the U.S.A, they now are. Before that time, it was ’self-evident’ to the ruling class that they had the right to do whatever they damn well pleased.

Unfortunately, the Americans have spent the last 200 years trying to eliminate the rights of individual humans and give them to corporations instead, and have finally succeeded with the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that corporations are people. Except, of course, that they are quite obviously not.

The Libertarians and Conservatives have also noted, quite correctly, that most governments are corrupt. This is not new: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” was said in 1887. It is a lesson the conservatives keep trying to tell us, but that liberals largely ignore.

In the health care debate in the United States, conservatives commonly claim that the government is far too corrupt and/or incompetent to be trusted to run health care.  They are quite correct. The United States government cannot be trusted, and public health care will certainly result in a ‘healthcare-industrial complex,’ just as the U.S. has long had a military-industrial complex, an energy-industrial complex, and now even a prison-industrial complex. That the healthcare-industrial complex may be somewhat better than the current mess is not good enough. This is why conservatives argue for small government.

Flowing from this, subsidies are also bad. They do distort the market, and they do become permanent. Once any subsidy is put in place, a vested interest automatically arises to defend it, whether it’s for farming or steel. One of the reasons we are facing the deadly issues of peak oil and climate change today is because we have subsidised oil for many years.

It is important to note that subsidies can take many forms; this is often overlooked by today’s conservatives. Building highways with taxpayer dollars is, in effect, a subsidy to the oil, auto, and trucking industries at the expense of the most efficient mode of transportation: trains. The massive U.S. military presence in the Middle East is an indirect support to the oil companies.

Liberals and Communitarians

Liberals realize that social stability is only possible if there is a large and secure middle class, and ideally no poor. There must be opportunities to build a secure life, or people will get restless; people with nothing to lose are very dangerous. Thus the liberals have many government programs to help the poor and disadvantaged.

These programs are far less likely to create vested interests to support them, because the poor are not nearly as organised and certainly nowhere near as well-funded as corporations receiving subsidies. Furthermore, the more successful the programs to lift people out of poverty, the fewer poor people there are. The reverse is true with corporate subsidies; the more we give them, the more they spend on perverting government to get more.

Communitarians – not communists – know that the community also has rights. That is, a group of people living in a certain area have rights that take precedence over, say, a rich investor or global corporation seeking only profit. If you can’t do something with the agreement of the local people, then you can’t do it – no matter how much money you will make or how you justify it with your theories.

Socialists

Socialism in the sense of Communism, where the state exerts overwhelming centralised control over the economy, is dead. It has failed so obviously that no sensible person seriously considers going that route today. Every time it has been tried, a murderous dictatorship results.

Social Democracy

Social democracy is a mix of markets and reasonably honest government regulation. Government is kept honest by decent electoral systems like proportional representation and openness. (Why should a citizen have to file a freedom-of-information request? Why, in this age of the Internet and when all documents are on computers anyway, aren’t all government documents automatically posted publicly, from meetings of minutes to detailed budgets? The only reason is because someone is trying to hide something.)

Social democracy as practised in the Scandinavian countries, Germany, and a few others, seems by far the most workable system so far. It helps explain why Denmark and Germany are the world’s leading manufacturers of wind energy, for example, or why the European Union follows the precautionary principle rather than allowing corporations to test their products on an unwitting populace, or why their economies suffered considerably less during the recent U.S.-caused meltdown.

Do What Works in Reality, Not What Sounds Good in Theory

To listen to Libertarians and Conservatives, deregulation is The Answer. Get the government out of the way, they say. But it is long past time to admit that deregulation of powerful corporations leads to big problems. We have plenty of evidence; let’s stop pushing that failed theory. It didn’t work in reality.

And, unfortunately, while I am normally dead-set against subsidies, there are times when they are necessary – during a war, for example. The market will not defend your country from invasion. In our case, we face peak oil and climate change, both threats that exceed the danger of any war except nuclear. Had we not subsidised an oil economy, we probably would not be in this situation now, but we did, didn’t we?

Ideally, we could simply stop all subsidies to fossil fuels and the market would then favour wind, solar, conservation, etc. Unfortunately, we don’t have time. Peak oil appears to be happening about now, and we must do something about it now. We need a World War II-level of mobilisation to rebuild our railways, to revamp our suburban style of living, and to move to non-fossil fuel-based agriculture. If we wait for the market to fix this, we’ll be back in the Bronze Age and there will be mass suffering.

Even more unfortunately – Liberals, I’m talking to you – our governments are too corrupted by vested interests to be trusted with this scale of expenditure and control. Look at the billions thrown at the banking sector, or the much smaller amounts given to the auto industry. The wise thing to do would have been to let the auto companies fail and put the money into rebuilding the train system.

So, if I am to be true to reality, I have to admit that we are stuck. We do not face a problem, we are in a predicament. Problems have solutions. Predicaments may not. We have allowed our governments to become too corrupted to do what must be done to save us.

The result is almost certain to be a crash. Unless some Winston Churchill-like figure arises and leads us to a better future, we will have to go through a crisis. What will emerge post-crisis is impossible to say. Could be something that works; could be a dictatorship.

Do you ever feel like you’re the only sane person in an insane world? I don’t want to believe that climate change and peak oil and peak fish and ocean acidification and various other looming catastrophes are coming. Who does? That would be psychopathic. At the same time, ignoring real-world evidence and shouting down scientists seems rather…crazy.

It’s easy to start questioning your sanity when so many act as if nothing is wrong. Here I am, fighting to get action on peak oil and climate change, and there goes Joe the Plumber, commuting to work in his brand new Hummer with a Support the Troops bumper sticker. And it’s not just people who could, possibly, be excused for not knowing any better. The Canadian Conservative Party, U.S. Republicans, and Libertarians everywhere – all loudly turning a blind eye to reality.

Is this not crazy? I have asked for contrary evidence from credible sources, and all I get are:

• Variations on “You’re crazy”; people calling me paranoid, sex-deprived, too stupid to even talk to, and so on
• Sources that are clearly not credible; look, if some guy is not a climate scientist, receives funding from oil companies, has a history of being funded by corporations and pushing their view against that of the vast majority of scientists and accumulated evidence, HE IS NOT CREDIBLE

I suppose people are desperate to believe what they want to believe. Perhaps many of them think that by shooting the messenger, the message he carries also dies. I wish it were true.

How do you keep your sanity in a world where so many lie to themselves and others? One fellow sent me a list of supposed climate scientists who deny that climate change is happening, or agree that it is but say it’s not dangerous, or agree that it is happening and is dangerous but we can’t do anything about it anyway so let’s make as much money and whoop-it-up while we can; I can’t remember. There are so many such lists and so many conflicting claims. The problem that I have found with them is that they are bullshit. When I pointed out to the man who sent me his particular list that, on the very first page were numerous people with zero qualifications in climate science (some management consultants, a couple of engineers, economists, retired stock promoters and so forth), he immediately shot back with “Well, what about all the other people on the list?”

This is intellectual dishonesty. Look, if you are relying on a list of supposed credible sources, it is your job to validate your sources, not mine. When I see a list where it is instantly obvious that many on it are not credible, don’t expect me to go through the entire list. I’m throwing the whole thing out.

Peak oil denial is even more incredible. Obviously the oil will run out someday; there was a fixed supply to start with. To deny that is to confirm your foolishness: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

Given the massive dependence of our entire economy on oil, it seems rather dumb not to plan for it running out – or even to make the slightest attempt to determine when it will. That’s like piling your family in the car and driving off into the wilderness without ever once checking the gas gauge. I would call that a really stupid thing to do. Crazy. Nuts. Idiotic. Irresponsible. Yet that is exactly what highly paid people whose job it is to check the gas gauge have been doing.

So who’s the crazy person here? Am I loony because I only listen to credentialed, peer-reviewed climate scientists? Is it nuts to ignore people paid by oil companies, who just happen to be pushing views that maximise short-term profits for oil companies, and who have a documented history of doing the same thing for tobacco and other industries? Who’s the kook? Me, who insists on credible sources, on actual data, on common sense, or the people who say the oil is not going to run out now because it’s just not. Why? Because. It’s like talking to a three-year-old. In a thousand-dollar suit.

If a sane person were locked in an airtight room, one of his first thoughts would surely be, “How long will the air last?” The answer to that question determines your response. Do you have minutes, hours, days? If one of these peak oil or climate denier twits was locked in that airtight room, I suppose he would sit passively, secure in the knowledge that the air fairy would provide.

For non-twits

There are several very good websites and books that provide credible information on peak oil and climate change. Here are some websites:

Peak Oil:

• The Oil Drum
• Energy Bulletin
• Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) International

Climate Change:

• RealClimate: Climate Science from Climate Scientists
• Grist
• The Guardian’s Environment section

And some books: