Posted on 01/27/2008 12:41:59 PM PST by Momaw Nadon
MIDDLEVILLE, Mich. -- It was around midnight one evening in November when Aaron Wissner shot up in bed, jolted awake by a fear: He wasn't fully ready for the day when the world starts running low on oil.
Yes, he had tripled the size of the garden in front of the tidy white-clapboard house he shares with his wife and infant son. He had stacked bags of rice in his new pantry, stashed gold valued at $8,000 in his safe-deposit box and doubled the size of the propane tank in his yard.
"But I felt panicky, like I needed more insurance," he says. So the 38-year-old middle-school computer teacher put on his jacket and drove to an all-night gas station, where he filled three, five-gallon jugs with gasoline.
"It was a feel-good moment," says his wife, Kimberly Sager. "But he slept better."
Mr. Wissner has had more than a few fretful nights since he became "peak-oil aware," as he calls it, about 30 months ago. In embracing the theory that the world's oil production is about to peak, Mr. Wissner has tossed himself into a movement that is gaining thousands of adherents, egged on by soaring oil prices, the rarity of big new oil finds and writings on the Internet.
There are now dozens of "relocalization" working groups scattered from Maine to Southern California pushing for people to spurn cars, buy local produce and work where they live. Mr. Wissner's own congressman, a Republican nuclear physicist named Vernon Ehlers, is part of the 13-member congressional Peak Oil Caucus formed in late 2005. City councils from Bloomington, Ind., to Portland, Ore., have passed peak-oil resolutions to gird for the looming crunch.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
What a fool.
Hey Aaron come check out my garden.Peas the size of your brain,no joke.
Of course if you stockpile guns and ammunition you will have your choice of places to “shop” among the people who stockpile rice and beans.
Nothing like an old Krag Jorgenson and a few boxes of .30/40 to lower the barter price.
Nothing to worry about, Al Gore is leading Democrats to stop buying and burning gasoline.
If it wasn’t a joke, why did I laugh so hard?
He probably comes from a family that built bomb shelters during the “duck and cover” era (although that was an infinitely more rational response than hoarding gasoline and gold). The proved oil reserves in Canada alone are in excess of 150 years at current consumption (and 99% is shipped to the US, making Canada, not Saudia Arabia, the largest exporter of oil to the US—source, Department of Energy).
This guy will run out of breath many generations before we run out of oil.
I am very skeptical anytime I read or hear about what the experts think about the world’s energy reserves. I can’t think of a single thing the experts have been right about in my entire lifetime. One day it’s a new ice age, the next it’s global warming. Then it’s overpopulation, only to hear next that we’re in danger of becoming extinct. Then they told us to expect several much worse than normal Atlantic hurricane seasons, only to have an absolute dearth of storms hitting the US.
The experts told us we had to prevent forest fires and put them out as soon as they sprung up. Then, after several decades, we realize without the fires there would be no new trees. Now Canada has vast areas where the trees are dying and there’s no new ones to replace the old ones.
A shortage of energy will be felt when we can no longer whip into our neighborhood gas station and buy gas, regardless of the price. There are at least a half a dozen scenarios that could lead to that in weeks, if not days, and none of them have to do with how much crude oil is under the ground around the world. The Iranians could cut off about a third of the world’s oil flow by simply blocking the Straights of Hormuz.
All it’s going to take is one entity willing to inflict pain on themselves as long as they can inflict it on their enemies and we will have serious problems.
They could...for maybe a half an hour.... The bigger enemy of energy isn't the Iranians...it's the greens....
....get a bicycle, a bag of gold and an AK-47.
Oh good grief ***ROLL EYES***
And what really frosts my soft parts is our reluctance to use as weapons the things we have that no one else can supply. Why haven’t we moved to shut down Iran’s inflow of gasoline? We know how tenuous the theocracy’s hold is on the people of Iran. Why on Earth do we continue to let them skate when we have proof positive that they’re the source of 80% of the world’s terror problems? Even if we can’t prove that they’re killing our forces in Iraq, or at least providing the weapons that kill our forces, let’s just mess them for the hell of it. Every time they open their mouth to brag or taunt us they should have it shut for them.
Your are 1000% correct though about the greens! I can’t for the life of me figure out how they have managed to throw such a major monkey wrench into the works.
And doing their fair share of bringing onto this Earth more creatures to destroy it.
Just as long as big brother government doesn’t get into price controls and Soviet state style distribution, the supply in the USA will be fine.
This dude has some serious mental problems.
The Peak has arrived. This is what Peak Oil is like.
Public school tenured teacher ?
This is Peak Oil and everything is fine. If something happens, and an incident that closes the Strait would be most serious, everything will not be fine.
Render the morbidly obese.
"Hush, Mr. Moore, it's for the greater good...."
I loose sleep but not over the price of oil.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.