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.

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.

A word of warning: To many, the Mobilisation Plan given here will seem extreme, even ridiculous. It calls for a radical restructuring of our economy, how we use energy and where we get it, how we transport things, including ourselves, how we grow our food, build our buildings, and even govern and educate ourselves. Radical it may sound, but necessary it most certainly is, and the sooner we implement something like it the more of civilisation we get to keep.

To those people who think this plan too ‘radical,’ I would suggest two things: First, what you or I think is entirely irrelevant in the face of reality. If the reality is that declining oil supplies will wreak havoc on our civilisation, then no amount of scoffing will prevent it. I would suggest you acquaint yourself with reality before deciding upon a sensible course of action. I will admit that it was only a few years ago that I would have considered this plan extreme, but I have been busy educating myself about the truth of our situation. This article assumes that you have done some research already and are aware we face multiple crises; you know I am not scaremongering, but simply confronting reality.

Second, if you are willing to think sensibly about our current economic model, that is what you will find to be ultimately insane. And you will realise that one reason such ‘radical’ changes are needed now is because we did not make smaller changes earlier. We are like the smoker who has ignored doctor’s warnings for a long time, and now faces radical surgery and possibly even death as a result.

Here are the things that must be done in developed countries, particularly Canada and the United States; you can see why we’re unlikely to do them – there will be great resistance from vested interests and the majority of unaware people. As a result, we will likely suffer greatly.

Energy

• Redirect all oil subsidies to conservation and renewable energy
• Immediate 10-year plan for energy self-reliance; no more imported oil, even from “friendlies”
• Redirect a portion of existing energy to create renewable energy; eg: take 10% of hydroelectric and dedicate it to making wind turbines

Our entire civilisation is built on “cheap oil.” This cannot be overemphasised. Oil is in virtually everything, from food to pharmaceuticals, from cars to houses. As the price of oil goes up, and it is, so will the price of virtually every single thing we need or want.

We should have been ‘getting off oil’ years ago. Back then, when the warnings first started coming in about peak oil and climate change, we had decades to make a gradual transition to an economy that used much less energy thanks to conservation, and where that energy we did require came from renewable, clean sources. Now, we are in trouble and must move very rapidly.

Transportation

• Passengers, mail, and parcels: high-speed electric rail
• Redirect all road and automaker subsidies to electrified local rail (light rail, streetcars) and long-haul rail; develop high-speed on/off loaders for freight trains
• Ban private jets; ban short-hop flights; phase out medium haul flights; ban air freight
• Overseas and long-haul flights must be off oil in 5 years or they’re grounded
• Shipping, from cruise ships to freighters, must be off oil in 5 years

Every single one of our transportation choices is entirely dependent upon oil. The recent oil price spike (up to $147 per barrel just before the recession) started to get people thinking about the cost of commuting everywhere, but it was nothing compared to what is coming. Because we transport everything by oil-fueled means, and because so little is produced locally, oil price increases will drive up the price of everything from food to iPods.

Government

• End all subsidies for anything that uses fossil fuels, including farming
• Completely open government up to scrutiny; no need for Freedom of Information requests
• Ban all lobbying; end the revolving door between government and business
• U.S.: withdraw entirely from the Middle East (including Israel) over the 10 year ‘get off oil’ plan; downsize the military to strictly national defence; use demobilised personnel to rebuild the national rail system, net-zero housing, etc.

Government is not the problem, but it is a big part of it. Any business subsidy favours that business and distorts the market. Had we never subsidised oil (in the form of tax breaks to oil companies, free roads for trucking companies, and foreign occupations), we would likely be driving electric cars and riding electric streetcars now. We would be eating organic foods. And we would not be dependent upon hostile nations for energy.

However we did, and we also did not forbid pollution; we allowed companies to use the atmosphere (and everywhere else) as a dump. In doing so we dug ourselves into a big, dark hole, and we do not have time for ‘the market’ to figure a way out. That is why I have called for subsidies to renewable energy and conservation, because we now need to overcome years of going in the wrong direction.

Government must be made entirely transparent. Every report, minutes from every meeting, budgets – all must be made immediately public (and readily searchable). Corporations must also be brought to heel; many are so large that they have more power than our elected representatives. Only by doing these two things do we have a chance of keeping these new subsidies from becoming as big and permanent a problem as the ones they replace.

Economy

• Move to a stable and sustainable economy – abandon the growth economy to the trash heap of history where it belongs
• Stabilise population now; more people need more resources
• Break up large companies; replace organizations that must be large with co-operatives with strict rules on size and influence; no business can be allowed to become To Big To Fail or large enough to influence government
• Ban advertising aimed at children; make all advertising non-tax-deductible
• Re-localise as much as possible, from decision-making to farming; decisions should be made by those affected, not remote capitalists or bureaucrats

The whole idea of a continuous growth economy on a finite planet is insane. Unchecked growth in the body is a cancer; in a segment of the economy it is a bubble. When the entire economy must grow constantly, then the entire economy is a bubble. This includes population, which must be stabilised in every country as quickly as possible. In developed countries, where population is only growing because of immigration, population can be stabilised immediately.

Unregulated capitalism is as much as disaster as the so-called socialism that led to the Soviet Union. As history has clearly demonstrated on more than one occasion, capitalism sooner-or-later devolves into crony capitalism, where one or a few companies control large market segments – and exert far too much influence on government cronies.

As corporations and governments increase in size and centralise power, people become pawns for profit. Decisions must be made by those who are affected by them, not just those who profit from them.

Food and necessities

• Relocalise farming starting immediately
• End all farm subsidies except those transitioning small, local, family farms to organic
• Enact trade protection for necessities; limit food imports to luxury items

Almost all our food is grown on massive factory farms. Every piece of farm machinery runs on oil or a derivative. Irrigation pumps run on gasoline. Fertiliser is derived from natural gas, also in decline. Pesticides and other agro-chemicals, without which industrialised farming cannot exist, are petrochemical based.  All transportation – trucks, trains, ships, and aeroplanes – run only on oil products.

Oil price increases will ripple through the system raising food prices dramatically. The only food that is immune from this effect is locally grown, small-scale organic, and we know how much that costs. We are ‘eating oil,’ and as the price of oil increases, so must the cost of our food.

There is no advantage to international trade in food, except to the multinationals receiving subsidies to do so. The United States has a population in excess of 300 million; is there really any economy of scale for food that is not possible in a market of this size?

Any country not self-reliant for necessities is vulnerable and prone to war: see: current U.S. involvement in the Middle East; any empire in history.

Shelter

• Change building codes effective immediately to net-zero energy; use current best practices until we develop more ways to build sustainably
• Plan to abandon cities like Phoenix

We can build houses and office buildings right now that require no net energy to construct or heat. It is also true that building codes favour current, grossly inefficient methods of construction. We should end this favouritism immediately.

Some cities, particularly those in the American Southwest, are completely unsustainable without a reliable supply of cheap oil. Phoenix is the poster child for this; it essentially consists of 4 million commuters living in the middle of a desert. All food, water, and energy must be brought from far away. Mass transit is not even possible because the city is so spread out. We either begin a planned rampdown of cities like Phoenix or oil shortages will do it the hard way.

Education

• Launch major research programs into sustainable building
• Educate people, rather than indoctrinate them

Our current educational system is dysfunctional, to be kind. It is really designed to train children to be obedient factory workers and unquestioning consumers, and in that it has succeeded all too well. A glance at the number of intelligent idiots (and many not so intelligent) who unquestioningly believe Fox News tells the story. Here we have a supposedly advanced society where citizens allow themselves to be rebranded as consumers, where they believe talking heads rather than scientists on matters of science like peak oil and climate change, and where economic ideology is still taken seriously despite decades of being just plain wrong.

Suggested books if you want to learn more

Lester R. Brown has proposed a plan in much more detail. It is available for free download or can be purchased.

The first two books discuss peak oil and its consequences. The second two books are plans to at least mitigate some of the crisis we face.

We are likely at or near peak oil. The effects will be devastating, including a permanent recession/depression and a major scaling back of civilisation-as-we-know-it. The current recession may well be as much due to high oil prices – now ~$80 per barrel, or quadruple the price of just a few years ago – as to the banksters.

Note: This article is aimed at people with some awareness of peak oil. (It has been increasingly in the news lately.) For a frightening and well-sourced look at expected outcomes, check out Life After the Oil Crash. If you don’t want to ‘believe’ that site, there are plenty more where that came from; I’ve sourced a few reputable sites at the end of this post along with some good peak oil books.

The key points are these:

• Our economy requires continuous growth. Our economy runs on oil. Oil substitutes are nowhere near being ready in sufficient quantity to take over, if that is even possible. Therefore, a reduction in oil supply/increase in prices means an economic contraction.

• Because oil is used for virtually every single thing in our society, from factory-farmed food, to our entire transportation system, to even building alternative energy systems, price increases will ripple through the economy and bankrupt countless people and companies.

What I want to talk about here is the expected response of various governments, especially mine (Canada) and the U.S. Given a serious depression brought on by spiking oil prices and a shortage of supply, what will governments do?

Ignore the problem

Up till now, they have largely ignored the problem, but reality is about to rear its ugly head and become quite unignorable. Still, so-called ‘conservative’ governments have a solid track record of ignoring the suffering of millions of their own people, and there’s no reason to believe that they will not try to do so again. The Great Depression was a perfect example, in which right-wing governments in Canada and the United States believed that ‘the market’ would correct itself given time.

When that didn’t happen, those governments were replaced with more activist leaders, but by then millions were utterly destitute. And now, unfortunately, all the major parties in Canada (Conservatives and Liberals) and the U.S. (Republicans and Democrats) are essentially ‘conservative,’ which in practice means in service to the wealthy.

Token gestures

This is really a variation on ignoring the problem, in which a leader pretends to take something seriously but does not actually take realistic steps to address it. Token measures may be taken, often announced with great fanfare, but the problem continues to worsen because nothing is really being done about it.

In fact, the token measures usually make the problem worse, because the powers-that-be squander money and other resources that could have been used to combat the problem. Case-in-point is the recent Canadian ‘economic stimulus,’ in which the Conservative (in name only) government handed out billions for paving driveways and adding decks to houses. A sensible response would have been to insist that all stimulus money be used for conservation, say insulating one’s house, or for alternative energy generation. This would have had the effect of saving people money and energy and slowing climate change and reducing the impact of peak oil. However, that contradicted ‘conservative’ ideology so could not be done, and as a result Canada now has billions of dollars less and continues to increase energy usage.

Baby steps

The masses are getting, restless, so Something must be done. Token gestures are no longer adequate; too many people are losing houses, going hungry, turning to crime, and otherwise making the government look bad. If Something is not done, the current government may actually be replaced.

The Obama administration’s recent announcement of a few billion for nuclear power is a baby step. It will help a tiny bit – or it may hurt. Either way, a few nuclear plants will not get the U.S. ‘off oil’ any time soon.

Alternate endings

After all avenues of non-action have been exhausted and there is real threat of political change, even insurrection, somebody may get serious about addressing the root cause of the problem – or they may claim to do so in order to seize power.

In the United States during the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt became President and his government took serious steps to end the Depression and to make sure it couldn’t happen again. In the first case, for example, FDR put people to work through civic improvement programs, and in the second the Glass-Steagal act was passed to keep the banksters in check. (Its repeal is a big part of the reason the current crop of banksters again crashed the economy.)

On the other side of the ocean, a madman used the German depression to seize power.

There is another possible ending for us. It could be that no realistic actions are taken and no megalomaniacs attain power, but things just fall apart; the centre cannot hold. Let’s go through each of these scenarios.

The Madman

Nobody wants to take this possibility seriously; I suppose we like to think we’ve ‘evolved’ past this stage of allowing such evil. Realistically, it has happened within the lifetimes of people alive today and the conditions are ripening for it to happen again, especially in the United States.

There are a very large number of seriously unhinged people in the United States, and some of them have achieved quite high levels of power. That Sarah Palin would seriously be considered as a vice-presidential – and now even a presidential – candidate is truly frightening. That tens of millions of Americans think she’s just the ticket is insane. That Rush Limbaugh has 25 million ‘ditto-heads’ speaks to the debasement of the American people.

The U.S. has only two parties, and one has allowed the other to wage a ‘culture war’ for the purpose of dividing the nation and making it easier (for them) to conquer. They are abetted by a sniveling, corporate media that has fought in court for the right to not tell the truth when reporting news. The other party (the Democratic Party, in case you were wondering) is little better, and Obama is, in practice, little different from his predecessor. Many people elected Obama thinking him to be another FDR, not Bush-lite.

All of this sets up the conditions for a strong leader to sweep into power and take control – all that is needed is a crisis. A peak oil-induced depression will be a very serious crisis indeed.

The centre cannot hold

It is quite possible that our political parties are so corrupt that they will dither and hand-wave and make token gestures until the country simply falls apart. If federal governments remain ineffectual and lose sufficient credibility, and if people are suffering greatly, then the federal government may become obsolete.

This could happen in various ways. Regional leaders may arise who provide an answer – perhaps not one that works, but that appears to work long enough. These leaders may push for secession of their region.

Or, things could just disintegrate into something like James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand, where even provincial/state governments fade away and everything reverts to the local level. Communities live or die individually according to the leadership shown therein.

Given that rising oil prices have a strongly localising effect, this ending is quite possible. As oil prices rise, for example, so do transportation costs. That favours local manufacturing, local farming, and individual conservation over giant, remote generating plants. As communities come to rely on their own resources more-and-more, and as the higher levels of government continue to extract taxes that provide less-and-less value to people, there will be a strong pull away from federalism. Nobody likes taxation without representation….

Half-assed action

Both of these outcomes are non-solutions to our current predicament, which is that the price of oil is going to keep going up while the supply diminishes, progressively rolling back technology and civilisation. The final possibility is that a strong leader who ‘gets it’ somehow attains power and takes some action, but not likely enough to get us to a sustainable way of living. Keep in mind that this person could be a Hitler or an FDR.

Let’s think this through from the point-of-view of this strong leader (could be national or regional).

• He (for convenience I’m using the masculine) recognizes that the oil supply is dwindling and there is nothing he can do to prevent that.
• Insufficient action has been taken to prevent many of the worst effects, and so there will have to be a significant change in living standards; in particular, there are many things the government will no longer have the money to do.
• The market did not and will not solve the problem.
• Localisation will be driven by increasing costs of transportation, and this is a threat to national/regional unity.

What to do?

Realistically, the only choice is to redirect remaining energy supplies to building a sustainable society. This sounds simple and even appealing, but in reality it means a huge change in how we live and will be strenuously resisted by everyone from CEOs to commuters. As a result, any leader will almost certainly take a ‘half-assed’ approach to get us through the worst of the crisis, thus permitting a partial recovery and setting us up for the next crash.

For example, fuel economy standards will be raised, school buses may be pressed into service as commuter buses, growth of suburbs may be curtailed, building codes will be revised, and quite possibly a large-scale build-out of alternative energy will begin, with wind and nuclear in the lead.

Conservation will be strongly encouraged, and governments may no longer be able to give plum deals to heavy industrial consumers, for example the aluminium industry. Recycling could take off. Sports teams and rock stars will no longer be able to jet around the country in order to make millions. Local agriculture will revive somewhat. There will be a lot of people who have to find new ways to get by as cubicle jobs evaporate.

All of this may get us to a point where we can plug along for awhile at $100 per barrel oil, or $200, or wherever it settles briefly. John Michael Greer suggests this first crisis period will last 10-25 years, and this seems reasonable. However, the continuous growth economy will still be in place, the supply of oil will continue to diminish, and competition for the remaining oil will increase, so at some point there will be another collision between the two and another step down.

The only way to prevent this is to move to a sustainable way of living. The means exist to do this, but, as mentioned already, there will be very strong resistance, so most likely we will not go all the way there. Unfortunately, the longer we wait, the less resources (primarily oil and gas) we will have to fuel the transition, and the closer will be other, very serious problems like climate change. If you’ve been following the latter at all, you know that the cost of mitigating climate change now is vastly less than the cost of attempting to adapt to it later – and we’ll have less resources to to do.

I’ll detail the steps we really need to take in the next article.

Suggested books and sites if you want to learn more

There are several excellent websites that discuss peak oil.

• The Oil Drum: Discussions about energy and our future
• Energy Bulletin: Peak oil primer
• ASPO (Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas): Understanding peak oil

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

The first book (from left-to-right) inspired the movie Collapse, currently in the theatres. The book pulls no punches about what we can expect in a post-peak oil world.

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

The third book is Kunstler’s World Made by Hand, which essentially describes the outcome of “The centre cannot hold” scenario. The U.S. reverts to a very local ‘economy’; life is shorter and more brutish.

The next final book describes the outcome of an experiment that took off and became wildy popular: The 100-mile diet. The authors attempted to live only on foods grown within 100 miles of their home. They were motivated by concerns about climate change, but in reality peak oil is going to strike first and make the 100-mile diet a necessity rather than an option. (I discussed some serious concerns about this even being possible today in Why Most Food Could Never Be “Local” – What this means in a peak oil world to your food choices, to the 100-mile diet, and to vegetarians.)

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.

Steve Savage has written a very interesting analysis, complete with very helpful charts and tables and such, explaining clearly Why Most Food Could Never Be “Local”. This should scare the hell out of anyone aware of peak oil concerns and everyone who likes to eat. Let me briefly and grossly oversimplify Steve’s analysis:

• Most areas cannot grow everything locally; this applies not only to avocados and oranges, which require a certain climate, but also to wheat and many other crops for various reasons. (Read Steve’s article.)

Let me add the peak oil problem:

• Given that much food cannot be grown locally, an advanced transportation system is required to bring prairie wheat, Florida oranges, and California-everything-else to New York.
• Our entire transportation system runs on oil. All of it. We have no electric trains or trucks, no hydrogen-powered tractors and combines.
• Given that we appear to be in or very near peak oil, how exactly is food getting from farm to table?

Some will say, No problem, as the price of oil goes up alternative transportation methods will be devised. I say, How’s that working so far? The price of oil has gone up, considerably, including a very worrisome spike last year to $147 per barrel, and still no push to rebuild the rail system, no serious effort to figure out how to move essentials like food without diesel-powered trucks.

Perhaps the price of oil has not gone up enough? The price per barrel is now somewhere north of USD $80; it was around $20 only a few years ago. If a quadrupling isn’t enough incentive, what will be?

The problem is that so many government subsidies to so many things are masking the price of oil, from the U.S. military presence in the Middle East to Canadian subsides to the tar sands (CDN$ 1.6B per year) to ‘free’ roads for trucks to roll on…and so on. Farmers get subsidies, too, of course. This is ridiculous because they are providing something we all need, so of all people farmers should be able to make a handsome living without tax dollar support. And no doubt farm subsidies will increase as oil prices increase, in order to keep food costs down.

However, these subsidies reduce the perceived need to get our transportation system off oil, so we just keep digging ourselves in deeper until the government no longer can or will provide enough subsidy to keep food prices low.

Then people will rapidly discover that de-carbonising the transportation system will take a great deal of money, energy, and time. And during all that time, food prices are going to jump, meaning less money in the economy for everything else, what with food being a necessity and all, meaning a recession.

What this means for the 100-mile diet, and therefore everyone’s diet

Steve’s findings plus very costly transportation means the 100-mile diet is going to become the norm, because once transportation costs become a factor, the more oil required to bring food to you, the higher the price of that food. And right now, we have a very inefficient transportation system.

To be realistic, 100-milers should be pushing hard to restore our rail system and upgrade it to electric. If we do that, then we can easily enough ship fruits and vegetables around North America. Rather than airfreighting tomatoes from California to Ontario in the winter, we can put them on high-speed electric train.

If we don’t do that, if people can only eat what grows locally (unless they’re wealthy), then everyone’s dietary choices are going to get a lot more limited.

What this means for vegetarians

Many vegetarians are so for compassionate reasons; they don’t want to contribute to the suffering of animals. Others are vegetarians to reduce their impact on the planet, as raising beef, for example, requires ten times as much land and vastly more energy than growing the equivalent amount of calories in vegetables. These are two of the primary reasons people go veg.

However, those of us who are vegetarian recognise that it is a choice, and that choice is going to get much more difficult for people in cold climates. It is much easier to grow hay and feed it to a cow during the winter – and slaughter the cow when needed – than to grow tomatoes in January in Alberta.

It is possible we could grow them in solar greenhouses, and I am part of a group designing a solar greenhouse for market, but realistically we’re a long way from greenhouse tomatoes in Alberta. Without an affordable transportation system between the warmer parts of the country/continent and the colder parts, it’s going to get much more difficult to be vegetarian in the latter.

So, guess who else should be pushing hard to rebuild and electrify the rail system….

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 the country. They found certain foods were simply no longer available. 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 are growing your own vegetables year-round in a solar greenhouse, something we might all want to look into. The second also has “recipes for soaps, teas and things like that which can be made from greenhouse-grown items” which sounds fun.

There is no shortage of evidence that we have the technology we need to ‘green’ our energy supply. From Pacala and Socolow’s Stabilization Wedges to 100 Miles of Mirrors, we have what we need to drastically cut carbon emissions and get off oil. The cost of acting now is vastly less than acting later – an ounce of prevention is still worth a pound of cure – and there could even be a huge net savings. The United States, for example, would no longer need a military ‘presence’ in the Middle East. So why aren’t we taking serious steps in that direction?

Why aren’t we moving? The answers, I believe, are denial and vested interests.

Vested Interests Protect Their Own Interests

Let’s start with the obvious: vested interests. U.S. oil, coal, and auto companies have spent a ton of money ‘influencing’ politicians to ensure that subsidies, tax breaks, and favourable legislation continue to protect their businesses. Favourable legislation includes spending on roads rather than electric trains, for example.

In addition, those same vested interests have given many millions to marketing firms thinly disguised as ‘think tanks’ to promote the theory that the market will solve all problems, and that to interfere with its workings is dangerous and even immoral. Dangerous, because interference will introduce distortions in prices so that actors in the market – buyers and sellers at all levels – will be acting on false information. (This ignores the rather obvious fact that the vested interests have been working very hard to bend the market in their favour in various ways for decades.)

And immoral, because the market has been put on a pedestal. That is, these ‘think tanks’ have been promoting the idea that the market is infallible and to tamper with it is to disrupt something sacred and pure. This is why more objective observers call such market worshippers Market Fundamentalists. Perhaps it should be more properly termed the Market.

It should be quite obvious to even a casual observer that the ‘Market’ is far from perfect. Perhaps they missed all the recent bubbles, the current recession, climate change, the huge executive bonuses for CEOs of companies on welfare? This brings us to the second, much larger problem.

Denial: Ignorance is Bliss…for now

In order to continue to pretend that the magical market will solve all problems, people must come up with all kinds of often insane justifications and must ignore – even attack – contrary evidence. The ‘think tanks’ do plenty of both, and they in turn feed the media and many individuals. Given the sorry state of the mainstream media, much of the time it simply regurgitates whatever press release or trumped-up justification for the market failure-de-jour that the think tanks send, and willing Americans, Canadians, and others lap it up because it fits with what they want to hear.

In order to pretend that everything is rosy, it is necessary to overlook inconvenient facts. For example, yesterday I wrote an article stating we should limit immigration to a level that stabilises the population in the United States and Canada. I have been roundly attacked for this by people who completely ignore facts they don’t want to know.

Some called me a racist, although I did mention in the article that my wife and many friends are Colombian. I guess I’m not doing racism right. Others just called me crazy. Maybe, but I can be crazy and right. The most serious problem, though, is that nobody addressed the main issue: Sooner or later, population growth must stop. Rather than face up to this reality, most people simply choose to ignore it and/or attack the messenger.

The same pattern is repeated with peak oil, the idea that, sooner or later, the oil must run out. Many people simply ignore that reality and pretend that either it never will, or at least not now. Any evidence that the oil is running out now, or that we should prepare for such an event, is ignored or attacked. Climate change has been turned into a political circus by shills – the think tanks and paid marketers for oil and coal companies – despite the rather obvious and growing evidence that yes, humans can and are affecting the climate.

Stop the Insanity

To deny reality is foolish, even insane, yet that is what the majority of our society does, including many so-called ‘leaders.’ Some of these people are highly intelligent, but they are sorely lacking in wisdom. Ignorance may be bliss for a time but reality’s a cold, hard bitch. When the oil starts to run short and prices spike – that’s a bit late to start thinking about converting an economy and civilisation that is totally, utterly built on cheap oil.

When the climate is changing – irreversibly and for the worse for humans – that’s a bit late to stop what’s causing the change. When population turns into overpopulation, it’s too late to think about reducing it; Mother Nature will take care of it, though.

It has been said that humans respond to crisis well, but not to long-term threats. This is one of the reasons we were able to retool our economies so quickly for World War II (after years of denying the evidence of Nazi Germany’s military build-up and Hitler’s stated plans), but seem paralysed in the face of creeping threats like peak oil, climate change, and overpopulation.

Of course, many more people might realise that these things are crises if they were not being told otherwise by the media and leaders, who are saying that because that’s what they’re being paid to say. Ain’t the Market grand?

A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Savvy people have used crises in the past – for better or for worse. The Bush administration jumped all over the terrorist attack of 9/11 to launch two wars, enrich their friends, and eliminate many Constitutional rights. Bush and Obama  used the economic meltdown to enrich their bankster cronies. Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the Great Depression to bring in numerous social reforms that exist – and are cherished by millions – to this day.

Today, we face multiple crises, any of which could be absolutely devastating: peak oil appears to be first in line, with climate change, overpopulation, and resource drawdown not far behind.

What is it going to take before we realise that these crises are just that, and respond accordingly?

An increasing number of analysts, from the “Archdruid” in Endgame to Don Peck in a thoroughly depressing article in The Atlantic Monthly, are suggesting that the United States (and therefore likely Canada) have entered a period of prolonged or even permanent higher unemployment. This will lead to decreasing wages for everyone still employed, declining home values, and quite probably increased crime and social unrest as people find themselves scraping by with no prospects for improvement. There is a solution, but it is highly politically incorrect: limit immigration.

Canada's Population Growth

• Zeroing immigration would reduce population and would result in any increase in employment going to residents.
• Capping immigration at a level that stabilised the population would result in new jobs going primarily to residents.

It’s that simple, and no doubt many will accuse me of racism. (My wife and most of my friends are originally from Colombia, by-the-way.)  Others will trot out all the reasons why immigration is good for a country, but there is one inescapable fact these people frequently ignore: Population growth must stop sooner or later. Think about the city or area where you live; now double the population. Then double it again. Then again, forever. Imagine Los Angeles with 25 million residents, 50 million, 100 million. Imagine Atlanta at 20 million, like Mumbai, or Vancouver and Seattle with 32 million each, like Tokyo.

Sooner or later, we must stabilise population, and we must adjust the economy to work with this. The main driver behind immigration is the desire for continuous economic growth, and the easiest (although not cheapest) way to achieve economic growth is to bring in more consumers. This can’t go on forever. Imagine your country packed with people from sea to shining sea, no room for anyone. High levels of immigration also keep wages depressed, which employers like – and major corporations are the main drivers of the continuous growth economy and our governments.

Let’s look at some figures

Canada: The unemployment rate (according to government figures) is 8.3% (January 2010), which means 280,000 more people are unemployed now than pre-crash October 2008.

During that time, immigration to Canada has been approximately 309,000.* Hmm.

Of course, not all of those people were workers; many were children, mothers-in-law (we have sponsored mine), and others who will not be working. However, there were about 186,000 “economic immigrants,” meaning people who came to Canada to work. If that class of immigrant were eliminated (or at least tied to the level of emigration from Canada), there would be 94,000 more people unemployed, rather than 280,000.

United States: “About 8.4 million jobs have vanished in the U.S. since the recession began in late 2007.”

During that time, legal immigration to the United States has been approximately 2,250,000 and illegal immigration roughly the same, for a total of 4.5 million. (Accurate figures are obviously hard to come by for illegal immigration.)

As with Canada, not all of those immigrants were coming for jobs, but equally clearly the current U.S. population could have filled the jobs that economic immigrants did. The United States is in far worse shape in terms of unemployment than Canada.

The Solution: Limit Immigration to Stabilise Population

First, we must admit that population cannot grow forever. Given that, we should limit immigration to a level that results in a stable population:

• Stable population = (In-migration + births) – (out-migration + deaths)

In Canada, economic immigrants make up 60% of all immigration. We should eliminate this category and increase the number of refugees and family members allowed up to the point that population is stable. This would also greatly speed up the immigration process, which is currently four years or more for some family class members, and would allow more refugees, something that will become increasingly important as climate change refugees increase.

In the United States, illegal immigration could be stopped very quickly if the government went after employers rather than individual immigrants. The reason this hasn’t happened is because illegal immigrants keep wages down and do many jobs that nobody else wants. Ending illegal immigration and the economic class of immigration would mean new jobs would go to residents – including those jobs that nobody wants but immigrants are currently doing.

The U.S. is in big trouble because of illegal immigration, and perhaps not for the reasons you think. By allowing millions of people in to do jobs that nobody else wants, wages are suppressed for those jobs. Such jobs include picking fruits and vegetables, for example. Resident Americans might do those jobs – certainly I bet many would in the current economy – but would insist on a living wage. Illegal immigrants do not have this option. This means that prices for American-grown fruits and vegetables would increase, and that is going to mean unhappy consumers. However, in the real world, a country cannot rely upon imported, cheap, and often exploited labour forever. If the U.S. were to bite the bullet now and do this, unemployment would drop and wages for these jobs would increase and be registered legally – meaning tax revenues would also increase, a matter of desperate concern to many state governments right now.

We can limit immigration now or later, but eventually the growth has to stop. We would be wise to manage the process and the subsequent transition to a stable economy. The alternative is to wait until many millions more are in the country and our options more limited.

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* Based on 247,243 immigrants in 2008 divided by 12 to get a monthly figure, and multiplied by the 15 months from October 2008 to January 2010.

UPDATE: Various comments (here, on Reddit, and on other sites) claiming I’m naive, foolish, racist, etc, but not one addresses the rather obvious point that population cannot increase forever. Not one.

80% of all U.S. federal transportation dollars go to roads and highways. 90% of all Michigan state transportation dollars go to roads and highways. Detroit has lost more than half its peak population and one-third of the city is vacant. In Spain, one can buy a single ticket that pays for parking, light rail, and subway, and everywhere the Ave high-speed electric train goes, so prosper the cities it connects.

These are some of the key messages from the PBS documentary Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City, which asks whether Detroit would be rejuvenated by once again installing rail lines for streetcars throughout the city. I previously suggested a way that Detroit and other Rust Belt cities could greatly benefit from a building program for car-free neighbourhoods, and this documentary adds streetcars and public transit to the equation. Sadly, Detroit sold its last streetcars to Mexico City many years ago.

Nobody is suggesting that all it will take to revive the Rust Belt are streetcars, but the fact is that mass transit, particularly on rails, is the most efficient way to travel and cars are damn expensive. Free people from the need to own a car and they have more money to spend in their neighbourhood shops and restaurants, or on their houses. This is especially true for poorer people, most of whose income goes to necessities. Given that Detroit, ironically, contains a large number of people who don’t own cars and can’t really afford one, public transit could be a big help.

Rail-based transit also has the huge advantage of concentrating commercial development at train stations, where car-based development occurs willy-nilly everywhere. It is far more efficient to have all the stores in a downtown and neighbourhood centres than spread out in strip malls all over the city. Efficiency includes not just fuel, but time spent by shoppers.

Reviving Detroit

Detroit’s woes have been oft documented; the city’s population is down to one-half its peak and one-third of the city is vacant. Many areas of Detroit have reverted to a natural state, and Blueprint America discusses one attempt to restore Detroit by turning depopulated areas into farms. This has the potential to create thousands of jobs and a secure food supply for the city.

Portland’s transit system is often held up as a model for the rest of the United States, and deservedly so. However, while Portland’s system is very good for the U.S., the Spanish system profiled in Blueprint America is far superior because it is integrated. As mentioned previously, riders can park at the train station, take the train into the city, and then take a subway to their ultimate destination – all on the same ticket.

And everywhere that Ave goes, so goes prosperity. Tourism and trade naturally follow the trains. Could streetcars and high-speed trains help Detroit? Certainly the jobs could, and so would the mobility that mass transit would bring. Detroit is a huge, sprawling city; Boston, San Francisco, and the island of Manhattan could all fit within Detroit’s boundaries. As the personal automobile rose to ascendancy, the city was redesigned to suit with now disastrous results. Detroit’s problems are only going to get worse as the price of oil increases and fewer people can afford to drive. The city was designed to accommodate cars more than people, and has paid the price.

My own thought is that streetcars connecting walkable, car-free neighbourhoods is the way to go for Detroit. The personal vehicle is not going to make a comeback on a mass scale, and therefore neither is any city dependent upon it. Detroit also needs to let depopulated areas go and replace them with farms. There is no reason farms and urban areas cannot coexist – and every reason they should.

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.