As we enter the age of post peak oil, we have to begin to prepare ourselves for inevitable changes to our lifestyle. This video is a 52 minute version of the documentary “The End of Suburbia”. This is a sobering must watch video. What it predicted at the time it was made several years ago has begun to happen. As the Hopi elders say “We are the ones we have been waiting for”.
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.
The world is filling up with stuff.
Modern industrial society has lost touch with the real value of what it produces. Our wasteful consumption and our disposable attitude toward so much of what we produce and use is going to hurt our children. In spite of the fact that most parents would never eat first and feed their kids what is left over, when it comes to our use of natural resources we are doing just that. As the planet’s population grows and we reach the peak of our oil production capacity along with many other minerals and materials we are robbing our children. We have eaten the best parts of the chicken and we are leaving them with the bone.
When you stop and really think about it, it is unsettling. This video invites you to re-think what you consider to be junk. It invites you to let go of the “What will the neighbors think” mindset and re-look at what you use and see if you can give it a second life.
In another article we talked about the idea of killing your front lawn. The idea being that in the United States a huge amount of resources go into keeping lawns green. 40 billions dollars is spent annually on 18 million acres of residential lawns in the United States.
The treatment and upkeep of those 18 million acres involves another 5 billion dollars worth of chemicals derived from petroleum. To give you an idea of what 18 million acres and 5 billion dollars represents that is 8 times bigger than Yellowstone National Park and 3 times the annual budget of the US National Park Service.
As part of walking the talk of Low Carbon Home, I share my experience of beginning the process of replacing my front lawn. This video was taken towards the end of two very long hot and dirty days of work.
