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.

At best this reads like poor parody, at worst it fits his career goals; from WIKI (excerpt):

“Charles Bensinger, co-founder of Renewable Energy Partners of New Mexico, describes Kunstler’s views as “fashionably fear-mongering” and uninformed regarding the potential of renewable energy, biofuels, energy efficiency and smart-growth policies to eliminate the need for fossil fuels.[2] Contrarily, Paul Salopek of The Chicago Tribune finds that, “Kunstler has plotted energy starvation to its logical extremes” and points to the US Department of Energy Hirsch report as drawing similar conclusions[3] while David Ehrenfeld writing for American Scientist sees Kunstler delivering a “powerful integration of science, technology, economics, finance, international politics and social change” with a “lengthy discussion of the alternatives to cheap oil.”[4]

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]

In June 2005 and again in early 2006, Kunstler predicted that the Dow would crash to 4,000 by the end of the year.[8] [9] The Dow in fact reached a new peak by 2007. In his predictions for 2007, however, Kunstler admitted his mistake stating “Let’s get this out of the way up front: the worst call I made last year was for the Dow to crumble down to 4000 when, in fact, it melted up to a new all-time record high of about 12,500. The reason we saw this, in my opinion, was that inertia combined with sheer luck to keep the finance sector decoupled from reality…”. He also predicted, however, that in 2006 the United States housing bubble would start to deflate, which appears to be borne out by latest data. [10] However, unlike Kunstler’s Dow predictions, which were uniquely his, the bursting of the United States housing bubble was widely forecast before Kunstler began discussing it. [11]”

Of course, the greens-socialists will find something that will “kill us all” in this tech, too,

Ampere-hour tax! Price it out of existence!

18 cents current, plus 42 cents increase called for by 'bridge collapse commision' -->60 cents/gallon fed gasoline tax; divided by fleet averages MPG, for about 3 cents/mile times ampere-hours/mile, to get a base rate, then triple that "too pay for the cleanup of abandoned fossil-fuel infrastucture...", then do the comaparable thing with state & local levels.

if/when I buy a house, I can install and use a wood stove

As long as the Smoke Nazis allow it, you could do a lot worse. Except for about 3 years, we haven't been without a woodstove since 1984, in 5 different houses. Burning one upstairs, and another downstairs right now.

A 25W desk fan circulates the air, but convection works almost as well. No pellets to buy...we cut our own wood on the property, to get rid of dead or dying trees, and any blow-downs...and no need for electricity for the stove to work. We COULD buy coal, as the upstairs stove does have both wood & coal fire grates in it, but no need.

10F outside, and only got up to 22F today, but the only time the (1,500W) electric heater kicked in was while we were cleaning ashes, and going in & out to bring in wood to refill the wood boxes, then restarting the fires.

This entire thread is based on the fallacy that we are running out of petroleum. I have seen nothing to support the idea that world oil reserves are getting smaller. If you have a link proving this, post it on this thread.

To the contrary, we find more oil everyday. The problem with our oil supply is that environmentalist will not let us get the oil we know exists, nor economically build the refineries to distill it to useable fuels.

Less environmentalist = more oil = cheaper gas.

If a Democrat wins in November, I foresee four to eight successive years of almost incessant economic contraction.

A Democrat includes McCain. His positions are indistinguishable from the other 3 individuals who admit being Democrats. A RAT would screw up the economy, foreign policy, the war on terror and 2nd amendment rights.

I figure I have 15 years to salt away some extra money for retirement. I don't want half of that spent with retards in charge of the government.

Just as “peak oil” has nothing to do with the price of gasoline and diesel fuel, “post-oil” has nothing to do with the supply of hydrocarbons from which to make fuels.

The only thing that counts is the price of fuels at the pump. In my area today, gasoline sells for US$2.89 per gallon. Right now in the UK, gasoline sells for the same as US$ 7.50 per gallon. Even at the lower US price, there are already conversion technologies that can break even in cost to convert coal and other hydrocarbon resources into diesel and gasoline.

As much as we may not like it, our economy could still function with gasoline at $7.50 / gallon. In fact, we are assured by many well meaning people on the left, like Al Gore, that we would actually be better of if gasoline cost that much.

With every dollar of increased retail price of fuels, more and more conversion technologies become viable and can be financed to provide all our fuel needs. Indeed, on source I reviewed stated that there are enough convertible hydrocarbons in our sewage sludge to replace all our oil imports.

In light of this, lists like this “Ten ways” are just foolish, agenda-driven drivel. We are fools to allow such authors to be anywhere near the levers of public policy. Sadly, all too often they are the ones leaning on them.

Although what the author is talking about will never happen, here are some serious thoughts.

Plug in hybrids. This is the wave of the future in transportation. These vehicles are hybrids with bigger batteries, with longer ranges, that can be plugged into an outlet when the vehicle is not in use. They can travel < 40 miles on battery alone, so for most commutes, they do not use gasoline. This alone will extend the use of gasoline beyond our lifetimes.

If there were a more serious need to save fuel, we would simply re-zone our cities to make most commuting possible without cars, by building high density inner city cores, with good public transportation. While this seems almost un-American to many people, it can be done well, making a healthy, high culture, exciting city within walking distance.

Coal already is becoming increasingly impolitic, even for the uses to which we now put it. Most Americans already want an end to coal in electricity generation, according to media interpretations of polling data. And the Democrats seemingly want policies destined to enforce rolling blackouts as a regular part of life for most Americans, or at least those few that still could afford any electricity (at much higher prices) after paying their taxes and buying some food.

So I really do not foresee the proliferation of coal-to-oil technologies because of political, not economic, thermodynamic, or technological constraints. The American people through their elected Democrat (and some Republican) representatives clearly demand drastic cuts in the fuel usage of their fellow compatriots and pine for the consequent unending economic depression. Political problems similarly prohibit the extraction and refining of petroleum within most unexploited sections of the American territory. Witness the ongoing fracas over the technologically novel possibility of oil drilling in the icy Chuchki Sea.

Plug-in hybrids? I agree. A few people already employ this technology, and it looks feasible for mass production. Notwithstanding battery problems in a few specimens, the Toyota Prius apparently proved a huge success. But apparently Kunstler doesn’t agree; I’m far more optimistic about the power of technology than he. But if theoretically we face oil decline under good public policy, this technology and its inevitable acceleration would work wonderfully. Proliferation of plug-in hybrids, however, requires electricity production, and the Democrats almost categorically oppose it, preferring rolling blackouts and prohibitively expensive electricity rates.

I’ve read variations of these predictions for many years. One of my grad school texts was the foolish prediction of Paul Hawken that we must all accept a level of disintermediation (1981), that is we would all start mowing our own law and fixing our own car and such. There are folks who enjoy that sort of thing and there are folks for whom the economics support that kind of choice. I am neither. The disintermediation principle violates the economic principle of trade-offs, that we make choices based on evaluation of alternatives. It also violates the history of progress through creative destruction. We abandon old ways when we discover new ways and figure out how to make them preferred ways.

This clown doesn’t acknowledge the existance of human genius beyond his own very limited understanding of economics and technology development.

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