How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Peak Oil

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The following essay comes from the great Karavans site. Not very light thought at this time of year, but it certainly expresses how I feel about things these days, going into 2006. Link: http://karavans.typepad.com/karavans/2005/12/how_i_learned_t.html
Maybe all these theories are real, fake, planted, who knows? You hear the same claims about 9/11 and Pearl Harbour. Is someone trying to manipulate us through fear? Maybe. At any rate, environmental alteration and an end to finite resources are REAL and something we're going to have to deal with in the near future. The reality won't be pretty, either, I highly suspect.

I still hope, and (previously) even moreso at this time of year that humanity is smarter as a whole than as individuals and that we'll be able to work together to solve our common problems. I'm having a hard time as I get older justifying my hope, but it's is still there like the Grinch's heart. Whew! Pretty heady stuff for this reflective moment. Whatever.

Bah! Drink lots on Christmas day to handle your family, enjoy receiving more than giving, sleep in on Christmas morning and forget your problems for a few days. Merry Christmas.

Now, here is Karavans.

Someone recently accused me of being gloomy about the future because of my monitoring of Peak Oil.

Actually, I'm not a doomer. However, I do see a lot of short-term pain for long-term gain.

Let me quickly summarize the different scenarios as envisioned by the various factions of Peak Oil watchers. These are solely my classifications.

Being a movie buff I will use movies as a form of shorthand to identify these scenarios:

-Quest for Fire
This is the scenario envisioned by the gang over at Anthropik (although they are not alone in this thinking). They see a quick Peak Oil induced collapse of civilization followed by a huge die-off over the next 30 years with the survivors reverting back to the way humanity lived for 99.7% of its 3 million year existence: as hunter/gatherers.

Think Stone Age 2.0.

If you are tempted to do a knee-jerk dismissal of their ideas, I suggest you do yourself a favor and a spend a few evenings reading their Thirty Theses of Collapse. They know how and why civilizations collapse--and they all collapse eventually--when their primary source of cheap energy runs out.

-Little House on the Prairie
This is what I call the James Kunstler scenario. He is the author of The Long Emergency, a best seller on Peak Oil. Under this scenario we also have a die-off with the survivors settling down to a basically no-tech agrarian lifestyle like that of the Olson family in the old TV series.

A variant of this is what I call The Postman scenario. If government breaks down sufficiently there could roving gangs of bandits who decide that there’s a better ROI from robbing people than from work. In the movie the honest folk had to live behind stockades which often didn’t protect them from the bad guys.

-Firefly
This refers to the short-lived TV sci-fi series which blends the old west with a distant future set in space. I think this anachronistic vision is closest to what we will see by, say, 2030--minus the space travel. Firefly’s world is about living along the edges of empire free from its suffocating controls. When the crew travels towards the center of the empire it finds cities and a society much like ours today: a high-tech, corporate-controlled, police state with surveillance cameras and armed guards at every doorway. In contrast, when the crew flies out to the perimeters of empire, it finds the type of freedom people had back in the 19th century. Most Firefly outposts wouldn’t be out of place in the Wild West of the 1850s.

My hope is that we'll end up in an anachronistic low-power world but with Internet access and email so that people may continue to collaborate on solutions for the most pressing problems. We’ll still have some energy after Peak Oil but it will be allocated for priority uses instead of being squandered on three-block trips to Blockbuster in an SUV. The human population will be reduced significantly with the survivors finally understanding the importance of living sustainably. Wal-mart, globalism and all the corporate propaganda that tries to tell us that life is about working like a slave in order to buy mostly useless junk will be a thing of the distant past. Social and economic life will become localized. We'll trade with our neighbors instead of potential enemies half-a-world away.

If you stop and think about it, this is the life most normal human beings really want. We want freedom from meddlesome bureaucrats and politicians (and these days, busy-body fundamentalists) who want to tell us how to live. We crave some elbow room from our neighbors as well as the opportunity to spend at least part of our time in nature. We also want to experience genuine self-reliance at the community and individual levels. Life is truly about our relationships with other people and not about merely accumulating various gizmos.

Firefly portrays this type of life and contrasts it clearly with what we have today. This explains the resonant chord it strikes with viewers. I only watched it recently and fell in love with it despite not being a fan of the science fiction genre.

Let me end this post with a quote from The Long Emergency:

"These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope -- that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom. Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts."

My hope is that the smart people stop working on yet another way to download song snippets as ring-tones and apply themselves to working on renewable energy systems and other solutions to soften the landing for humanity over the coming decades.

Let's get back to being humans instead of just consumers.


� Steve Bell 2005
steve.bell@guardian.co.uk