The world oil supply is running down and we have no ready substitutes.

Climate change is happening now – stronger storms, more devastating wildfires, rising sea levels, diseases spreading – the list goes on, and there is every indication that it will continue to worsen.

The US economy, upon which the world economy still depends, is unstable due to corruption at the top, from most Congressmen to presidential advisors all being former bank executives.

Our leaders are not moving quickly enough to protect the economy in general, never mind your or my livelihoods in particular. Some of our leaders are actually doing things to worsen the situation, such as denying the very existence of climate change or ignoring the ever-rising price of oil.

We are facing “interesting times.” The turbulence has begun, and it’s buffeting us from all directions. Have you ever had the experience of going for a walk and, no matter which direction you were going, the wind always seemed to be in your face? That’s what the future is going to feel like for many people.

I could (and have) proposed large-scale responses to the situation, which frankly at this point need to be a WWII-scale mobilization to re-industrialize and re-do our living arrangements to drastically cut oil dependence immediately and, long-term, eliminate pollution of all kinds by moving to a ‘restorative economy.’

But we’re not going to do that in the foreseeable future, are we? Or anything even remotely close. If you take your family’s security seriously, then you will do what you can to buffer yourself against the coming storms. The best way I have seen to do that is Transition Initiative, and you should seriously consider joining (or starting) one in your area.

TI is a completely grassroots, apolitical initiative, and this is what they do:

Transition Network helps communities deal with climate change and shrinking supplies of cheap energy (peak oil). This process, which we call Transition, aims to create stronger, happier communities.

That’s how we’re going to get through this; by working together in local communities. As the Transition Network site puts it well:

What we are convinced of is this:

• • if we wait for the governments, it’ll be too little, too late
  • if we act as individuals, it’ll be too little
  • but if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.

Your level of involvement can be minimal or massive; the choice is yours. Here are some things that local TIs do:

• Teach people how to grow a garden, save seeds, preserve foods
• Educate people by showing documentaries about peak oil, climate change, solutions, and more
• Host online and IRL forums to discuss and learn
• Show people how to insulate their homes or build a solar greenhouse

Like it or not, the world is changing. You can adapt, or not.

Freedom with a capital damn ‘F.’

You may not agree with everything WikiLeaks is doing, but you must admit that it is necessary. Our governments, in particular the U.S. government, have gone too far. They are keeping too many secrets, and a secretive government cannot be trusted. The truth must come out.

Many Redditors are donating. Others may be helping with the current hacking of those banks and other institutions attacking Assange and WikiLeaks.

(To digress slightly, I really think governments and corporations are going to be in for a very rough ride. Once a few million young people realize they can make a difference by hacking to help WikiLeaks, why would they stop there – whether or not Assange is freed? Why would they not start choosing targets for transparency? If I were the CEO of CitiBank or Goldman Sachs I would be very worried right now.)

A whole lot of people want to do something but don’t want to risk arrest. So let’s do something.

Post your ideas on Reddit; upvote the best, and let’s donate to make the best happen.

Choose formats that are in the real world. Internet freedom is not enough, not will it last without wider freedom. First they came for Julian Assange, and I did not speak up, and so one day they came for the web….

I tried to choose messages that would be appealing to conservatives, because we need them on our side. It’s not conservatives versus liberals, or right against left. It’s those who value liberty against those who lust for money and power, and original conservative values are very much for freedom. I also picked formats that are IRL – we need to get our message off the net and ‘out there.’

If this takes off, we’ll need to coordinate donations and route them to the areas that donated. Does anybody have a suggestion for the best way to do that?

My suggestion for a relatively inexpensive way to get the message out:

Billboards, bus stop ads, any organization with digital advertising boards.

Benefits:

• Relatively cheap
• Message stays for at least a month, not one day like a newspaper ad or a few seconds like a TV spot
• Unavoidably visible to millions of drivers and passengers in good locations; you can’t miss them
• Local – donate to one in your area
• Makes a statement
• Sound-bite size – easy for MSM to briefly cover…while repeating the message

Suggested messages:

• “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”  - Thomas Jefferson
• Let Freedom Ring – subtitle: Support WikiLeaks
• The truth will out – support WikiLeaks
• It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Looking at you, Koch brothers.
• “A man does what he must – in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures – and that is the basis of all human morality.”  - Winston Churchill
• “There is nothing concealed that will not be revealed, nothing hidden that will not be made known. Everything you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight; what you have whispered in locked rooms will be proclaimed from the rooftops.”
  – Luke 12:2-3  - Love this one; found it on Daniel Ellsberg‘s (the Pentagon Papers leaker) site.

As someone on Reddit said today, he just realized we are witnessing history in the making. Wilileaks has exposed our governments, and they don’t like it.

But the true historic event that may come of Wikileaks is that it’s something a lot of young developers can do. Easily. They can become Leakers. Destroy Assange and WikiLeaks and you will move the young, disaffected, and technically savvy, who have realized voting changes little of importance, to start another site to host the files. In fact, probably a peer-to-peer filesharing site, so that there are thousands – millions – of sites.

The cats out of the bag now. Knowledge is power, and suddenly the big guy just lost some to the little guy. And the harder he tries to grab it back, the worse he’s going to look and the more legitimate the Leakers will seem.

UPDATE: And I forgot the obvious next step – attacking the attackers. Fighting fire with fire. Young developers can – and now are – hacking the sites of those who attack WikiLeaks: http://www.antemedius.com/content/payback-bank-froze-wikileaks-funds-hacked.

Well. Time to eat some crow.

A couple of weeks ago I slagged Lana (and fellow NDP MLA John Horgan) for standing in the way of what we really need, which is rapid and decisive action on climate change and peak oil. Their party will, in fact, contribute to both climate change and our dependence upon oil by continuing to subsidize it.

That said, it is pointless, unfair, and ungentlemanly to harshly criticize well-meaning people who are trying to do their best in our broken system. Lana and John, both of whom I know personally though not well, are good people. I don’t agree with everything they do; I think subsidizing oil and gas is shortsighted and foolish.

But.

And it’s a very large but.

Our political system is broken. I have written as much elsewhere, and will do so again in my forthcoming book, The Way Home. (Tentatively subtitled: You Can’t Get There from Here, or, what you should be doing to protect yourself and your family against the coming economic, environmental, and social collapse. Cheery, no?)

I wish she would follow-through on some very important promises; at one point, she had asked Guy Dauncey and me to serve on an advisory group to help her with environmental issues. That never happened, and we could have been of some help. As an almost trivial example, Lana was “named “runner up” as Community Leader in the annual CFAX awards for her campaign to replace disposable plastic bags with reusable ones.” (Almost amusing, considering CFAX leans heavily toward climate change denial.) Had I been advising her, I would have suggested that instead all bags should be compostable. What’s the point in replacing disposable bags with ones that last longer but still ultimately end up in the landfill? That still sounds like disposable to me.

Had I been offering suggestions, I would have suggested that someone in the government go talk to companies that make compostable products and ask them if they would locate a plant in BC if a law were passed requiring all ‘disposable’ bags to be compostable. I bet they would. It’s a guaranteed market.

I digress.

The point is, why am I being so hard on a well-meaning person who is doing her best within a broken system? Lana understands the danger of climate change. She is, I have no doubt, working hard within our system, which includes that of her party, to do the right thing.

It is unlikely to be enough. Ideally, all the well-meaning people who ‘get it’ would go on ‘strike, a la Atlas Shrugged.* If only all the Lana Pophams and John Horgans (and Brian Gordons) would go on strike, would refuse to serve a corrupt political system, surely the masses would be forced to confront reality, would rebel against the self-serving crooks who largely populate our political landscape, and finally start selecting people of wisdom over those of substance….

It is an idle and ridiculous dream at this point, and as someone committed to embracing reality, I must apologize to Ms. Popham (and Mr. Horgan). If Lana stepped aside, someone would rush to fill her place, likely someone much less worthy. I would infinitely rather have Lana as my MLA than that person.

I accused Lana of being an obstacle to the change that is necessary. That was unfair. In an ideal world, she would be. But we don’t live in an ideal world. All the wise people who ‘get it’ are not going to go on strike and force a confrontation with reality. We can’t even get it together enough to speak with one voice, never mind actually act in concert for the good of humanity and the planet.

So, all this said, I am glad that Lana is my MLA, and I apologize to her, publicly, for my harsh words.  Do I think her party, if elected, will do what is necessary to at least mitigate some of the coming damage due to climate change and peak oil? Sadly, no. But Lana is doing her best within a broken system, and I can hardly ask for more.

—————————

* For those who have not plodded through Ayn Rand’s opus, the premise is that those who actually do positive things go on strike. In Rand’s view, these people are people like steel and railroad magnates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think Globally, Act Locally

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

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

This is my new Wise Action Plan:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Shootist was John Wayne’s last movie – with Ron Howard as a badly behaved teenager, no less! – but this post is neither a movie review nor a reminiscence of John Wayne. The film was made in 1976, set in 1901. There are some aspects of civilisation that wouldn’t be harmed much by going back to that era – yes, all the way back to 1901. I don’t mean the gunslinging. But watching the movie, assuming the set was halfway authentic, they did some things right.

They built houses that today we would say have character. Beautiful craftsmanship, hardwood floors, incredibly detailed ceilings, fine furniture made of real wood and that would last many lifetimes if treated with some respect. Compare that to the crap we have today; you can’t tell me that IKEA is better than the furniture they had. Our houses are marginally better insulated and truly ugly, inside and out, compared to what our forebears built.

The house where Wayne was a boarder: gorgeous, solid wood everywhere, but the bar where the final scene plays out was magnificent. Stone outside, elaborate woodwork inside like you simply cannot get today, unless you spend a fortune and can find someone with the skills to do it. Inlays and insets, crown mouldings to make anything Home Depot sells look bland and cheap in comparison. And the bar certainly didn’t seem to suffer from any shortage of alcohol. Variety was more limited, I suppose; no wine spritzers.

The same day, I dropped my wife off for a meeting at The Union Club, built almost 100 years ago in 1913. Beautiful craftsmanship. Barring major earthquake or other disaster, and with decent maintenance, the Union Club building will still be beautiful in another 100, or 300, years. Same for the Odd Fellows building in Victoria, and countless other houses, commercial buildings, and other buildings from that era. Even my sister’s house, circa 1911, which was built as a tradesperson’s house and is small – 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 900 square feet – has more character and more quality than much of anything you’ll see today.

How did we go from a generation that experienced all this beauty and quality first-hand – to what we build now? Why didn’t we build on that craftsmanship and our appropriate technology to continue to make houses and buildings (and bars) that looked and felt like that and had decent insulation, solar heating, a non-wood-fired cooking stove? We used technology to make everything cheap, in every sense of the word.

The town in The Shootist even had a horse-drawn streetcar – but it was being electrified the next year. Electrified streetcars, in 1901. We’ll be lucky if we get that today before the oil runs out.

If we had to go ‘back’ to that level of quality, the world would be a better place, our cities and towns would be far more beautiful, and just maybe we would be better people for it. Our environment does have some effect upon us; perhaps we don’t value what we have because everything is disposable. We even think the planet is disposable.

Resources

The first two books are from James Howard Kunstler, whose biting analyses of all that is wrong with American architecture, if such even deserves the title, are contained in the first book. Check out Kunstler’s “Eyesore of the Month” for examples of “Architectural Abortions.” The second book contains his suggestions for better buildings and restoring community.

The third book is a collection of essays, drawings, and examples of New Urbanism, a school that seeks to rebuild community and has become famous doing so. The final book is the classic “A Pattern Language,” in which the authors describe their findings from studying buildings all around the world. They discovered certain patterns that are followed in all cultures – and so building in ways outside these cultures may express the architect’s ego but produce a house that is forever uncomfortable and ‘not quite right.’

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.