What Can We Do to Prepare for Peak Oil?
All of the steps
we're suggesting here would be wise even if we're all wrong
about peak oil, but if we're right, they're critical. They
fall into
three groups:
Steps The World Must Take
 Heading Off Wars
We need to address now the reality that petroleum will become precious in
ways we can scarcely imagine. We need to acknowledge that it is unevenly
distributed around the world and that it is most plentiful in areas where the people who live there don't care much for the U.S. or
for the west in general.
We must acknowledge that there will be those in every culture who cling to
their oil-consuming ways until they have no other choice, and that these
compulsive "oil-suckers" will advocate going to war to control one or more oil
fields. We need to address now how stupid and self-defeating that will be so we
can head it off when the next power-hungry oil-soaked leader tries to take us
into another futile oil war.
Rebuilding Efficient Transportation
There's a reason we built rails across our countryside. They make sense as a
means of transportation, particularly for transporting heavy materials over
land. We need to wean ourselves from our insane dependence on highway trucks for
the transportation of materials over land. Trains are about
three times more
efficient than trucks on a ton-mile basis. Are you asking how we will get
merchandise to Wal-Mart without trucks? Good. Now you're beginning to understand
why our big box retail system is doomed. Geography needs to matter again, and it will become important to locate your
business close to a rail head. Imagine that.
 We need to reclaim the human right to grow and harvest crops and to use crops
for next season's seeds. Farmers are quickly losing the ability to do that now
as the result of chemical companies like Cargill and Monsanto that obtain patents on life forms,
allow farmers' seed stock to be corrupted by them (which happens naturally), and
then sue the farmers for "infringing" on their patent. How on earth did
we let this happen? No one should be allowed to patent life, and the faster we
reverse this misguided distortion the better chance we humans have to survive.
Manhattan Projects
There are three major initiatives we humans need to pursue, each one with the
zeal, determination, and resources that the U.S., U.K., and Canada devoted to
the Manhattan Project
during World War II. These projects are energy conservation, alternative energy
production, and population reduction.
Energy conservation. We will continue to long for some new
source of energy that will replace petroleum, but there's just not one out
there. We have no choice. At least in the near term (the next 50 years or so), we
must learn to live with lower levels of energy. We need to stop building
commercial buildings now, because we already have plenty. We need to stop
building dwellings that are not drastically more efficient than the ones we're
accustomed to building.
We will need to become accustomed to living in smaller houses that are
designed to make the maximum use of passive solar energy
and to living in much closer proximity to our neighbors. What are now affluent
suburbs may become the slums of tomorrow, because they're not sustainable as
livable towns without cheap oil.
We will need to rethink everything we do, from our love of pets to where and
how we live to how we form relationships. Peak oil will change everything.
The best and least disruptive way to accomplish this kind of innovation is to
introduce a small tax on gasoline and other petroleum products. The tax should
grow a
little each year, offset by cuts in other taxes so that the system is
revenue-neutral. This will give everyone an incentive to conserve, and the
market will begin doing what it does best, encouraging the kind of
innovation that can keep our cultures viable without cheap oil.
Alternative energy production. We will use all kinds of stopgap
measures in the short and intermediate term as we struggle to carry on without
cheap oil. In the long-term, however, we need to search for a more sustainable
energy future. How can we drive down the cost and improve the efficiency of
solar panels? How can we make wind power more efficient? Is there a future for
nuclear fusion? These are the challenging questions with which our finest minds
need to be wrestling; let's encourage them to get the kind of technical and
scientific savvy they will need to address them, and then give them the tools and the incentives
they need.
Population reduction. No matter how you plot it out, the world has too
many people on it. Cheap oil has lulled us humans into believing that the normal
rules and limits of hunger, disease, and land use don't apply any more; during the oil age we have increased the world's
population from about 1.3 billion to about 6.5 billion today. The world probably
can't sustain a population of more than 2 billion or so without cheap oil, so we
are in for a brutal adjustment. If we're lucky, it will be a humane reduction we
have planned by sharply limiting births. If we're not lucky, it will be from
starvation, infectious disease, or war.
We need to get over our religious squeamishness about family planning now
and start reducing the size of families. "Natural
Family Planning" is a crap-shoot, and the sooner we admit that as a society,
the better off we all will be. We know how to keep from having babies, and we
just need to get about doing it. Aversion to family planning today is Byzantine,
superstitious, and fundamentally immoral. There's no reason why any family should
have more than two children or two births, whichever is less. As cultures, we
need to bring shame down on those who are too stupid or too selfish to realize
this. Any nation that doesn't immediately implement policies to limit births
needs to be treated as what it is, a dangerous outlaw that needs to be
sanctioned.
Yes, we know this sounds callous and cruel. Lee grew up in a family of six
and has wonderful memories of his large family. In fact, he was the sixth person (the baby), so the kinds
of limits we're advocating would have kept him from being here. But the survival of
our species is at stake, and we just don't have any more time to mess around.
Don't Think It Can't Happen
When we talk about these steps with our friends, someone usually responds
that what we're suggesting is just a pipe dream, that we won't act until it's
too late. That's possible, but it won't be because individuals are unwilling to
change. A
poll by the BBC in November of 2007 showed that 82% of the people in the
world thought it would be necessary for people to make sacrifices to control
climate change and were willing to make those sacrifices. And that's not
just in Scandinavia and France. That's in China, the U.S., and India too. We
humans know we need to change and are willing to do so. What we lack is
leadership.
Steps Your Community Can Take
Community Supported Agriculture
In the years to come our current system of transporting food an average of
1500 miles before it gets to your plate will crumble, because it's dependent on
a constant fresh bath of cheap oil. Your food will come from a farm much closer to your
home and, increasingly, from your own garden. Reach out to farmers who live near
your neighborhood and encourage them to take advantage of
Community
Supported Agriculture. The basic model of Community Supported Agriculture is
that you pay in advance for a market basket of food delivered periodically
(typically once per week). Sometimes the delivery is to your door, and sometimes
it is to a central pickup point. The advantage to the farmer is that there's no
concern about getting paid and fewer middlemen to deal with. The advantage to
you is that you get much fresher produce (typically less than a week after
picking rather than up to eight months after picking in your supermarket), you
are supporting the future of agriculture in your community, and you are
reconnecting with the land where you live. We used the
Local Harvest site to locate quickly
the CSA farms near our home.
 Stop Suburban Sprawl
We can't keep living in far-flung communities that require us to drive a
gasoline-powered vehicle (or any personal vehicle, for that matter) 30 minutes or more each way, every day, to get from
home to work and back again. The gleaming, sterile suburban neighborhoods of
today are very likely the future slums of America (and increasingly, the world).
Communities need to resist the urge to permit more and more of these bedroom
communities that we already know are doomed, and the ignorant hopeful who keep
squandering their savings and taking on debt to invest in them are victims. Just
say no. Nancy Reagan would be proud.
And while we're on the subject of sprawl, you have figured out by now, we hope, that we have drastically overbuilt our roadways, right? Those traffic
arteries that are so choked with traffic today will soon be vast expanses of
concrete and asphalt begging for use. Communities need to declare an immediate
moratorium on new highway construction. It will be hard enough to maintain the
roads we've already created when we can't get cheap oil; we surely don't need to
waste scarce resources building (or widening) any more.
And if you're in the business of building roads and highways, this is your
wakeup call. Time for career counseling, friend.
Let's make communities bicycle-friendly again. Lee would love to ride his bike
from our house to his office, but Amanda won't let
him because the SUVs that own the one street that connects the two make
it too dangerous. That's backward. Bicycles and pedestrians should own the road, and automobiles
should have to work around them.
Design Livable Communities
Figuring out what kinds of communities will be livable in the post-petroleum
era isn't all that complicated; you just think through what kinds of communities
can survive and thrive without using lots of petroleum. Here's our list of
attributes. You're welcome to share yours too.
- Towns that are easily reached by well-maintained rail but are small enough
that all points are within easy proximity to naturally productive farmland
(that is, that's not dependent on chemical fertilizers or pesticides or
power-assisted irrigation).
- Nearby fresh water.
- A compact, healthy, walkable, commercial center.
- Walkable neighborhoods.
- A reasonably homogeneous population so there's not an irreconcilable clash
between greedy haves and jealous have-nots.
- A climate that is temperate enough to allow low-energy living 12 months of
the year.
If you're ready to get serious about helping your community prepare for the
post-petroleum challenge, consider the
Transition Town model in use now in towns like
Kinsale, Ireland and
Totnes,
Falmouth, and Penwith,
England. These communities are beginning to study all the ramifications of the
end of cheap oil and to fashion an
Energy Descent Action Plan.
The goal is to become proactive and move in a sustainable and compassionate way
toward the future rather than to be dragged kicking and screaming into it.
Steps You Can Take Within Your Family
Reduce Energy Consumption
Time to get in training. Those who have already begun adjusting will have a
leg up on those who blithely continue their fuel-guzzling ways. Invest in a
programmable thermostat. Turn off the air conditioning completely and use
ceiling fans instead. Wear warm clothes in the winter and cool ones in the
summer. Make fewer trips in your car. Trade your car in for a smaller one, or
live without a car and take the bus. Move closer to your job, or tele-commute.
Buy locally grown food instead of the wax-coated stuff they sell in your
supermarket.
Relearn Forgotten Skills
Your great-grandparents knew how to survive in a low-energy way, because it's
the only life they knew. You will need to know too. Kneel at the feet of every
old person you know and beg them to tell you how to survive. They will
appreciate it, and you will be grateful later.
Raising Vegetables and Fruits
It really doesn't take a lot of land to grow a whole mess of vegetables; it
just takes a lot of work. Get busy now and learn to grow vegetables and fruits
while failure won't mean disaster. Learn what varieties grow well in your back
yard, what bugs you want to encourage (hint: the bugs you need are much more
plentiful than the ones you don't). Learn how to protect your food crops from
wildlife. Learn when to harvest.
 Putting up Vegetables and Fruits
It's a new day, and you won't be able to get grapes from 2,000 miles away in
February. Hey, we love fresh strawberries in December too, and we feel your pain. But you will be able to eat,
and well. We need to learn to can again. (And as with growing, we want to learn
while we can still screw up without starving).
Start with fruits; they're much simpler and more forgiving. Start with a
small quantity and work your way up to the larger amounts. If you know someone
who already understands this, ask them if you can help them so you can learn.
They will probably be delighted if you're willing to help peel and chop (it's tedious).
Then go home and practice what you've learned right away before you
forgot everything you've just learned.
Seek Sustainable Careers
You've already seen above a description of one career (in road and highway
construction) that's not sustainable. Here are some others: automobile
manufacturing and sales, retail management, plastic surgery, college teaching
(particularly in the liberal arts), real estate developer, truck driver,
airplane pilot and flight attendant, and architect, and any other profession
that deals with luxuries. Examine your own career and those of the people you
love in terms of how dependent they are on cheap energy. Here are some careers
we expect to be much sought-after for one reason or another: police officer
and firefighter, nurse, farmer, well-driller, and large-animal veterinarian. It may not be a
career, but the post-petroleum era will be kind to those who are
"handy" with plumbing, carpentry, electrical, and general repairs. This will be
a time when it's good to be able to repair a lamp, fix a leaky roof, and get an
extra few months out of a pair of shoes.
We first thought the post-petroleum era would be a bad time to be in the real
estate business. Then we realized that this may be the biggest short-term
opportunity of them all. When peak oil fully kicks in and we all begin realizing
that we are facing a future of low or no economic growth, there will be an
unprecedented and terrifying selling panic in real estate. We are facing a
buyer's market the likes of which no one has ever witnessed before. If you're a
real estate agent, begin gearing up for a short, glorious run of business, and
practice persuading your sellers to lower their price. It will be brutal to
watch, but it will be heaven if you want to make money selling real estate in
the suburbs.
Get Healthy and Stay That Way
The post-petroleum world will have nothing like the medicines and medical
procedures available to it that the developed world enjoys today. Coronary
bypasses, stints, hip replacements, and knee replacements will be unavailable to
all but the very rich, so we will be more or less dependent on staying healthy
and avoiding the need for complex medical help. One advantage, if you can call
it that, of the brutality of the post-petroleum era is that obesity and Type II
diabetes will be much less of a challenge than they are today, because both are
the product of our superabundance of highly processed food. We will also be more
likely to get regular exercise, because we will do much more walking and
bicycling than we do today.
And while we're on this subject, we
know from research
that people who are overweight by as little as 30 pounds are on average not only
less healthy but less wealthy as well. They don't spend more on food, but they
do spend more on life insurance and medical expenses, and they are less likely
to get hired as well as to receive choice assignments and promotions. So it
makes sense anyway, even if we're all wet about peak oil.
 Reconnect With Your Community
We've grown accustomed to retreating into our oh-so-private homes and
oh-so-private automobiles, and we're neither aware of nor interdependent with
our neighbors. We haven't had to be, because cheap energy brought us everything
we needed. When we can't run down to Publix or Home Depot and pick up everything
we need, we need our neighbors more, and they need us. Learn about the farms
near your home; know and support your local police. Get to know the churches,
mosques, and synagogues that form the spiritual backbone of your community. They
will be a crucial component of its stability in the post-petroleum era.
Understand your latitude and longitude, and know the watershed in which
you live.
Travel
This is counter-intuitive, because it uses lots of energy, but if there's
another part of the world you want to see, by all means go there now. Fly. See
another country. Experience another culture. And while you're in other nations,
study the way the people live there; you may be able to learn some things you
can share with your community when you return. And who knows? You may decide to
live there because the community is more sustainable.
Here's an interesting one: when cheap oil is no longer available and we can
no longer travel freely, we'll have our hands full dealing with all the problems
we will face, but we will have far less concern about global terrorism.
In a twisted sort of way, terrorism depends on cheap oil too.
Spread the Word
The better we understand how peak oil is going to change
our lives, the better prepared we will be for it. Share these ideas with your
family, your co-workers, your neighbors, and your friends. These concepts are foreign, and they challenge the notions that have driven our culture for
generations, so everybody rejects them the first few times they hear them; we know
we sure did. Changing minds takes hearing and reading them in several places from different
people and expressed in different ways before our minds can even begin to struggle with the core concepts. Plant
seeds. Live with having people think you a kook. Eventually they'll realize you're
on to something.
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