Ten Ways to Prepare for a Post-Oil Society

Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for being “Mister Gloom’n’doom,” or for “not offering any solutions” to our looming energy crisis. So, for those of you who are tired of wringing your hands, who would like to do something useful, or focus your attention in a purposeful way, here are my suggestions:

1. Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by means other than gasoline. This obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs could really prove fatal. It is especially unhelpful that so many self-proclaimed “greens” and political “progressives” are hung up on this monomaniacal theme. Get this: the cars are not part of the solution (whether they run on fossil fuels, vodka, used frymax™ oil, or cow shit). They are at the heart of the problem. And trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring system by shifting it from gasoline to other fuels will only make things much worse. The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car. We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.

2. We have to produce food differently. The Monsanto/Cargill model of industrial agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix this. Farming will soon return much closer to the center of American economic life. It will necessarily have to be done more locally, at a smaller and finer scale, and will require more human labour.

The value-added activities associated with farming — e.g. making products like cheese, wine, oils — will also have to be done much more locally. This situation presents excellent business and vocational opportunities for America’s young people (if they can unplug their iPods long enough to pay attention.) It also presents huge problems in land-use reform, not to mention the fact that the knowledge and skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly retrieved from the dumpster of history. Get busy.

3. We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in our nation organized for car dependency is going to fail to some degree. Quite a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami) will support only a fraction of their current populations. We’ll have to return to traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities (along with a productive rural landscape). Our small towns are waiting to be re-inhabited. Our cities will have to contract. The cities that are composed proportionately more of suburban fabric (e.g. Atlanta, Houston) will pose especially tough problems. Most of that stuff will not be fixed. The loss of monetary value in suburban property will have far-reaching ramifications.

The stuff we build in the decades ahead will have to be made of regional materials found in nature — as opposed to modular, snap-together, manufactured components — at a more modest scale. This whole process will entail enormous demographic shifts and is liable to be turbulent. Like farming, it will require the retrieval of skill-sets and methodologies that have been forsaken.

The graduate schools of architecture are still tragically preoccupied with teaching Narcissism. The faculties will have to be overthrown. Our attitudes about land use will have to change dramatically. The building codes and zoning laws will eventually be abandoned and will have to be replaced with vernacular wisdom. Get busy.

4. We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of Happy Motoring (including the entire U.S. trucking system). Get used to it. Don’t waste your society’s remaining resources trying to prop up car and truck dependency. Moving things and people by water and rail is vastly more energy-efficient. Need something to do? Get involved in restoring public transit.

Let’s start with railroads, and let’s make sure we electrify them so they will run on things other than fossil fuel or, if we have to run them partly on coal-fired power plants, at least scrub the emissions and sequester the CO2 at as few source-points as possible. We also have to prepare our society for moving people and things much more by water. This implies the rebuilding of infrastructure for our harbours, and also for our inland river and canal systems — including the towns associated with them.

The great harbour towns, like Baltimore, Boston, and New York, can no longer devote their waterfronts to condo sites and bikeways. We actually have to put the piers and warehouses back in place (not to mention the sleazy accommodations for sailors). Right now, programs are underway to restore maritime shipping based on wind — yes, sailing ships. It’s for real. Lots to do here. Put down your iPod and get busy.

5. We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies of scale (and kill local economies) — they are going down. WalMart and the other outfits will not survive the coming era of expensive, scarcer oil. They will not be able to run the “warehouses on wheels” of 18-wheel tractor-trailers incessantly circulating along the interstate highways. Their 12,000-mile supply lines to the Asian slave-factories are also endangered as the US and China contest for Middle East and African oil.

The local networks of commercial interdependency which these chain stores systematically destroyed (with the public’s acquiescence) will have to be rebuilt brick by brick and inventory by inventory. This will require rich, fine-grained, multi-layered networks of people who make, distribute, and sell stuff (including the much-maligned “middlemen”).

Don’t be fooled into thinking that the Internet will replace local retail economies. Internet shopping is totally dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no longer be cheap. It also is predicated on electric power systems that are completely reliable. That is something we are unlikely to enjoy in the years ahead.

Do you have a penchant for retail trade and don’t want to work for a big predatory corporation? There’s lots to do here in the realm of small, local business. Quit carping and get busy.

6. We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going to make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things. The curtain is coming down on the endless blue-light-special shopping frenzy that has occupied the forefront of daily life in America for decades. But we will still need household goods and things to wear.

As a practical matter, we are not going to re-live the 20th century. The factories from America’s heyday of manufacturing (1900–1970) were all designed for massive inputs of fossil fuel, and many of them have already been demolished. We’re going to have to make things on a smaller scale by other means. Perhaps we will have to use more water power. The truth is, we don’t know yet how we’re going to make anything. This is something that the younger generations can put their minds and muscles into.

7. The age of canned entertainment is coming to an end. It was fun for a while. We liked “Citizen Kane” and the Beatles. But we’re going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We’re going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We’re going to need violin and banjo players and playwrights and scenery makers, and singers. We’ll need theatre managers and stage-hands.

The Internet is not going to save canned entertainment. The Internet will not work so well if the electricity is on the fritz half the time (or more).

8. We’ll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive the coming decades. The huge investments we have made in these facilities will impede the transition out of them, but they will fail anyway. Since we will be a less affluent society, we probably won’t be able to replace these centralized facilities with smaller and more equitably distributed schools, at least not right away.

Personally, I believe that the next incarnation of education will grow out of the home schooling movement, as home schooling efforts aggregate locally into units of more than one family. God knows what happens beyond secondary ed. The big universities, both public and private, may not be salvageable. And the activity of higher ed itself may engender huge resentment by those foreclosed from it.

But anyone who learns to do long division and write a coherent paragraph will be at a great advantage — and, in any case, will probably out-perform today’s average college graduate. One thing for sure: teaching children is not liable to become an obsolete line of work, as compared to public relations and sports marketing. Lots to do here, and lots to think about. Get busy, future teachers of America.

9. We have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of intertwined rackets based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will not survive the discontinuities to come. We will probably have to return to a model of service much closer to what used to be called “doctoring.” Medical training may also have to change as the big universities run into trouble functioning. Doctors of the 21st century will certainly drive fewer German cars, and there will be fewer opportunities in the cosmetic surgery field. Let’s hope that we don’t slide so far back that we forget the germ theory of disease, or the need to wash our hands, or the fundamentals of pharmaceutical science. Lots to do here for the unsqueamish.

10. Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled. You can state categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely to fail — everything from the federal government to big corporations to huge institutions. If you can find a way to do something practical and useful on a smaller scale than it is currently being done, you are likely to have food in your cupboard and people who esteem you.

An entire social infrastructure of voluntary associations, co-opted by the narcotic of television, needs to be reconstructed. Local institutions for care of the helpless will have to be organized. Local politics will be much more meaningful as state governments and federal agencies slide into complete impotence. Lots of jobs here for local heroes.

So, that’s the task list for now. Forgive me if I left things out. Quit wishing and start doing. The best way to feel hopeful about the future is to get off your ass and demonstrate to yourself that you are a capable, competent individual resolutely able to face new circumstances.

Yes, this is "gloom and doom." Is he realistic? Perhaps, but very severely pessimistic. Let's call this "agenda" a plan hatched in a pessimist's worst-case scenario. And he's a poorly informed pessimist at that.

But we face a very serious issue here. Global petroleum production has stabilized, not increased, since 2004, and prices continue to soar. We perhaps could drill for oil in this country, but that's terminally impolitic and increasingly so despite rapidly increasing prices. How do we personally ensure our survival in a world suddenly deprived of oil? What if the Islamic Republic of Iran successfully closes off the Straits of Hormuz, shutting in a good proportion of global oil supply?

And what happens when Hillary Rodham Clinton gains the Presidency? She won't drill for oil, and she might capitulate to the Islamofascist terrorists and their allies in the oil-producing regions. We get one-third of our oil from this country and import the rest. How do our families survive when we cannot import oil?

you’ll know that things are dire

when gore, bono, and all the bozos

stop flying around the world on jet airplanes.

The post-oil regime has been expected off and on for 150 years. It is not going to happen abruptly after all, but we will find ourselves in reduced circumstances and may have to forget about suburbia.

This is a bunch of garbage. Two new technologies are about to eliminate the energy problem. One is workable nuclear fusion. There are three new approaches that show extreme promise. One just got a huge cash infusion from Paul Allen, a man not known for wasting his money. The other is the new battery tech based on nanofiber Silicon. That’s been posted about here a couple times. It permits basically a ten times increase in the weight to energy storage ratio of batteries using existing technologies.

In short, in 5 years oil will be a thing of the past except for mfg. and legacy (i.e., your current car) uses. Gasoline powered cars won’t vanish overnight, but their numbers will go down significantly over time, and then the law of supply and demand will crush oil prices.

Of course, the greens-socialists will find something that will “kill us all” in this tech, too, I’m sure, but it will be a real stretch that most should have learned to see through.

That will occur only when they die. For those of us without our own private jets, fuel for our motor vehicles will become too prohibitively expensive to make driving to work profitable after taxes and fueling long before they quiver. And don’t forget the price implications that diesel fuel prices will have on the cost of food and other goods.

People will figure out a way to make personal transportation happen. Count on it.

We can make oil from coal.

We can come up with better electric cars, and build more nuclear generating plants.

And that’s just for starters, with pretty well developed technologies. Algae-based biofuel is one that’s on the horizon (burning corn is a lousy idea). There are others.

We aren’t going back to walking and horses.

From Wiki:

"Kunstler, who majored in Theater at college and has no formal training in the fields in which he prognosticates, made similar predictions for Y2K as he makes for peak oil.[5][6] Kunstler responds to this criticism by saying that a Y2K catastrophe was averted by the hundreds of billions of dollars that were spent fixing the problem, a lot of it "in secret," he claims.[7]"

It would appear that he's still majoring in theater.

Football shoulder pads, umpire vests, and hockey shinguards lined with rabbit fur make good armor for protection against the horde of desert barbarians who will roam the Earth looking for fuel.

Learning basic archery using the crossbow will also prove to be a valuable skill, as will throwing the sharpened metal boomerang.

Stockpile ammo and firearms now. Don't wait another minute.

This person is a committed Marxist. He wants to remake society to suit his ideals. His thinking is not much different than the other grand Marxists except that he does not explicitly call for human slaughter. If Marxists like him gain power, they will use every coercive measure available to force us into their Utopian view.

We will only be deprived of oil if Marxists like the author get their way. They want to suppress the economic activity that they do not like.

Interesting topic, thank you. I wonder if any of the politicians know what they are talking about when they spout “energy independence.” When it comes to oil, we are locked into a certain amount of dependence forever. As I understand it, we need more refining capability; not sure what has held this up.

However, peak oil has some validity to it. We are well past our peak. And, for example, some of our resources are far more expensive to extract than the final product would be worth. The global oil market determines international politics, to say the least.

As for lifestyle changes, I would be all for being less car-dependent. Here in the big city, people could easily reduce car use by 1/3 if they had a mind to, but most prefer the car to stretching their legs a bit.

Also, I think straw-bale construction and energy-efficient remodeling are worth looking into. I would think FReepers would admire “off the grid” living.

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