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This following is a guest post by André Angelantoni, President of PostPeakLiving.com. André is also Cofounder of Post Carbon Marin and writes and speaks on peak oil and how to prepare to live in a world of scarce and expensive oil.

It looks like we’ve collectively made a huge mistake: we are fast approaching the point where we’ve extracted half of the cheap, easy-to-get oil and we thought the energy party was going to last forever. Despite decades of warnings, almost our entire infrastructure still runs on oil. In fact, 95% of all transportation energy comes from oil. With gasoline approaching $5/gallon and the certainty that it will go higher, we are looking at the end of our ability to run a complex society. The way we live now depends on abundant and inexpensive oil. Soon the gasoline shortages are going to start and our systems, which are of the highly-tuned just-in-time type, will start to falter and then break. Peak oil educators sometimes call this energy descent.

Historic production (left of dotted line) and predicted oil production at a 4% per annum decline rate. We have been on a production plateau since 2004.

There is still time to get ready, but the window is closing fast. Here are the first three things to take care of when planning for energy descent. Prepare your disaster kit. I recommend this for two reasons. First, recovering from a disaster is going to be much more difficult post-peak than pre-peak. It takes enormous amounts of fuel to move food and water to disaster areas and less of that will happen once the shortages begin. The second reason is because it gets people into the frame of mind needed to really understand the basics of living life. Choose where to live. Although I don’t think they are going to fall apart completely, cities may become unpleasant places to live. High-rise apartments that depend on vast quantities of energy to heat, cool and light them may become particularly unpleasant once the energy supply starts to stutter. James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, thinks that the small towns across the United States and Canada are ready to be reactivated, and I think he’s correct. They provide a good balance between access to food crops and access to services, like health care. Prepare for re-employment. The economy will decline as oil declines. Even now, at the very early stages, the airline industry is struggling with over a dozen airlines already bankrupt and more are on the way. It’s just as bad for the domestic car manufacturers, which don’t have the right product mix for a high-priced oil environment (worldwide tourism is reeling, too). One by one each sector the existing economy will fall apart and you will be lucky to have a job. That means you have to be resourceful and find a way to be useful to your community. Get yourself to the productive side of the economy. Learn to make, repair or grow something. And buy what you need now while the equipment and cash are still available. As you prepare, consider that we are moving from a world of cheap resources and expensive labor to exactly the opposite: labor is going to be cheap and resources are going to be very, very expensive.

Good luck on your preparations,

André Angelantoni

This article is based on the Post Peak Living UnCrash Course and The Guide to Post Peak Living. Both are free and are available at PostPeakLiving.com.