Making Other Arrangements

The Orion article is very well written with a long-term perspective. A similar article in appeared in Sacramento, California, newspapers in January 2006:

http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/Content?oid=oid%3A46557

Similar articles have been appearing around the US:

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/01/277777.shtml

Most encouraging is "Plan B"

http://planb.org/transcripts/esf/living-without-oil.php
World Watch Institute and constructive alternatives to our current spendthrift ways

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Beryl Octet @ Jan 25 2007, 03:01 PM) [snapback]380734[/snapback]</div>

I've been thinking about this for some time and would like to offer my thoughts on it.

First, my background is health care -- I'm a health economist. Maybe because of that, I tend to view dealing with peak oil in the same way that you are supposed to deal with an aging parent. The goal is not to maintain perfect functionality. That can't be done. The goal is to maintain the best functionality you can, at any point in time. Mom's had a stroke? Get as much rehab as possible. Can't walk without an aid? Get the most ergonomic cane. But don't spend time mourning the fact that mom can't get around like she used to, and don't plan you life on the pretext that she can. And don't be surprised by the crises when they arise.

In the short run (without moving/changing jobs/etc.), I think three basic principles help you to be more secure in a future where energy supplies are uncertain:
1) use less energy,
2) set yourself up to be able to switch among several sources of fuel, if possible, and
3) be able to store small amount of fuel, if possible.

And, of course, try to make these changes with the least expense and waste that you can.

1) is pretty obvious and you can get advice there anywhere.

2) is the key to feeling more secure about your family's ability to heat the house, cook the food, and turn on the lights, at least in the short run.

Here's an example. My main worry isn't gasoline, it's natural gas. US supply is marginal at best, we have essentially no infrastructure to import it, and without it I freeze in winter. A few winters back, about 30,000 homes in Maryland lost their gas because they couldn't keep up with demand during a cold snap.

So I bought a small "direct vent" kerosene heater (Toyotomi) for my office (a shed, really). It's an investment -- all told, it probably cost close to $1,000 with shipping and tank. It's clean -- the exhaust vents outside and claims to be 87% efficient, which is about as good as a furnace gets. I use it to heat my office, so it wasn't a dead loss. But I also bought the parts to let me move it into my house if necessary, and it would heat part of my house at least.

And I also bought a small cheap propane-fired catalytic heater (from Coleman, the camping goods company). It's dangerous to use these indoors, but if the choice were to use that (and run the C02 monitor) or freeze, I'd unhook the barbeque and run the catalytic heater. Though that would at best heat a small room.

So the net result is: right now, I heat my whole house comfortably and cheaply with gas. If that's interrupted, I can heat part of my house with kerosene. And if that runs out I can heat a room with propane. For a while, at least. If I had the option, I'd probably have a wood stove as well, even though that's about the dirtiest fuel you can burn in an urban area.

Transportation is the same strategy. I picked my house so I could walk to the DC Metro. I picked my physician, bank, and so on so that, if necessary (and when the weather is good), I could bicycle there. So, that's the same principle as heating the house: even if I can't get gas for the car, I can still get around, some. Just not as comfortably as before, and not as much.

I have the luxury of not having to commute to work now (after having done that most of my life). But if my livelihood depended on the continous availability of gasoline, then a) I'd have a Prius, and b) I'd set up the capacity to store a couple of months worth of commuting fuel in an exterior shed, if possible, and know how to use it (if you let it sit too long it goes bad, so you have to rotate your stock.) Just buy a few gascans and set them aside, empty. Filling them is a bad thing to do from an environmental standpoint, because gas cans vent fumes, though new ones vent less than old ones. And t's dangerous to have that much fuel in one place, but ... you make your choices. So don't fill them until you think you'll need them. But I believe one of the advantages a fuel-efficient car is that you can reasonably store enough gasoline to get you through a month or two of a gasoline shortage. So, if the prospect of intermittent gas shortages worries you, buy a few gas cans and put them in the shed, just in case.

For electricity, I of course bought an inverter to use with the Prius. There have been several good threads here and elsewhere on what you'd need to do, to hook up our Prius to provide electricity to your house. That would provide enough electricity for a few lights and the fridge, at least. And I keep looking at PV arrays, but that's a significant investment.

Same principle: if the electricity goes out, I have the capacity to have a little bit of electricity anyway, by using up gasoline.

Food security is an item that only seems to be discussed by Latter Day Saints and true end-of-the-world crazies, but I think that's well worth worrying about. If farmers can't ship it, we don't get to eat it. There are at least two routes you can do. One is to maintain large stocks of staples in your house, and rotate those so that they don't go bad. That takes planning and effort. The other is to buy a bunch of expensive freeze-dried, "nitro-pak" food that will last essentially forever, put it on the shelf, and hope you'll never have to eat it. All that takes is money. At the risk of sounding like a nut, Ive done some of both, though I joke with my son that I hope he likes freeze-dried food, because if all goes well he's going to inherit a lot of it. Water is a different issue. I bought some used food-grade HDPE barrels from my local Pepsi plant (they give them away for $5 each), and have a couple in my basement, and I have water barrels on my downspouts. But let's face it -- if it gets to the point where people can't get water, civil society is going to break down anyway, and feeding yourself will be the least of your worries. So, I keep water around in case we lose water from a big storm, that's about it. I have also gone the "edible landscape" route in the yard -- why plant a shrub, when you can plant a shrub that gives you food. But the entire production of yard and garden wouldn't amount to 1/100th of the calories we'd need for a year. People who talk about the value of backyard gardens are either vastly better gardeners than I am, or have no idea how much land you need to cultivate to feed a family of four for a year.

So it's the same principle. I buy my groceries at the store like anybody else. But I make an effort to have an alternative, if it should come to that. It's not like it's rocket science. Mormons, for example, are supposed to have a year's food storage on hand. They have lots of websites devoted to the ins and outs of food storage.

But all of the above is just for the short run. That'll get you through the temporary outages and spot shortages better than you otherwise would.

Whether or not any of this will be effective, when push comes to shove, I couldn't tell you. Hope I never find out. What I can tell you for sure is that it takes the edge off my worrying. I can't say whether I have a good plan, but I do in fact have a plan. I have done my due diligence, and for any of several plausible bad scenarios, I have my backup in place. At some level, given that I have a life -- family, schools, church -- the whole bit -- I can't image doing much more than that.

But what about the longer term?

Well, first, I think its hard to predict much, except to say that energy is probably going to get a lot more expensive over the longer term. But not infinitely expensive. We had a thread here last week where I looked up what alternative fuel sources appear to be economically viable with $5/gallon gasoline, and it looks like there would be plenty. At that price, for example, you can afford (dollar-wise) to gasify coal -- literally create gasoline from coal. And we have lots of coal. So we wouldn't have zero gasoline, we'd just have gasoline at $5/gallon. Other people have lived with that, so could we.

So I'm not sure I'd spend much time thinking about that, except to acknoweldge that energy is in all likelihood going to get more expensive. Whether we are going to revert to some sort of town-based local agrarian society, as some people think, well, that's speculation. We do what we do now because economies of scale make it cheaper to have big anythings -- cities, farms, factories -- and shipping costs are low. As shipping costs rise, ... some but not all of that may be reversed.

So, when people make these predictions about what the world *may* look like in the longer term, I don't find any of them compelling enough to act on. Not enough to disrupt my current comfortable middle-class life. I toy with the idea of buying cheap farmland on the US East Coast, but I'm kidding myself: I'm not a farmer, and I'd waste the value of it by doing that. So I make no major changes. I don't think it's time for that yet. I just do what I can to provide a little more short-term security.

Third, in terms of the dangers to me from peak oil, I rate economic disaster and civil unrest as far greater threat to my well-being, than simply having costly or nonexistent fossil fuel supplies. The last 30 years in the US have been an almost unbelievably benign economic climate. The last real recessions we had were from the 1970s' oil shocks. Since Jimmy Carter, Reagan had one short, sharp recession lasting less than a year (but with unemployment peaking at 10%, which is a lot). I guess there was a recession-ette at the start of the Bush administration. That's it. That's all the hard times we've had. We haven't seen a prolonged period when large numbers of middle-class people are unable to find work enough to feed their families. We have an entire generation for whom that type of situation is a sort of cultural myth, not a reality they might face -- and who live accordingly. So it will be interesting to see what happens if that does occur, if we actually have an old-style prolonged and painful recession, as a consequence of the dislocations caused by peak oil. People will do violent things when their kids are hungry.

More to the point, when prices go up, it's the poor who suffer first. It's not that there won't be any (gasoline, natural gas, food), it's that you'll have to be able to outbid others for it. (Unless things get so out of hand that the government literally rations things, as in the 1970s oil shocks here, or post-WWII Britain). So, as always, the poorest will suffer the most. And if you have the ready cash or trade goods, you'll be able to get what you want.

I know that sounds like "try to be rich", and sounds like I have no empathy for the less fortunate, but what I'm really trying to say is that a stock of readily available money ought to be on a par with a stock of readily available fuel, if you're worried about conditions deteriorating. People with no savings face immediate bad consequences when they lose their jobs. People with savings have some time to think about it, and ability to continue with their lives for a while longer.

So, those are my thoughts. 1) It's too soon for me to make life-disrupting changes in anticipation of an uncertain future. The only thing I can do "for the greater good" is to use less fossil fuel now, which I am already trying to do. 2) Fuel may be come more expensive, but it will be a long time (if ever) before it becomes unavailable. You'll just have to outbid others for it. 3) So in the short run, the only things I can rationally do are to be energy efficient, and to prepare for short-term disruptions in fuel supplies and in the economy. 4) I try to set up my life so that every critical resource I use has some cheap, partial backup available. That includes heat, electricity, transportation, food and water. 5) And money, per point 2 above. 6) But I realize that if there is a breakdown of civil order here, none of my little plans will do me a bit of good, so I ponder finding some remote place to run to, but have not done anything about it yet. 7) Even so, it is a comfort to have some plan in place. So I think I'm better off for having made these changes, even if I never have to use them.

 

People seem to equate "Peak Oil" with NO oil. It simply means that the total amount of oil production possible cannot be increased. We'll have abandoned oil long before it runs out. It'll simply be very cost uncompetitive with the alternatives. Considering how much out and out waste there is in this country I think that we could modify our behavior and have zero to minimal real loss of standard of living. Of course that doesn't mean that we should sit on our hands but at the same time we need to have an accurate understanding of the problem. There are lots of solutions. We just need to wake up and start implementing and refining those solutions. I think that the real difference now is there's not one solution. We'll need to replace cheap oil with a battery of alternatives. It'll probably be a blend of technological innovation (including efficiency) and simple conservation.

Think about how much food is wasted in restaurants. Thing about how big the portions are a restaurants. Think about all of the unnecessary packaging, all of the recyclable stuff that gets thrown out. SUVs (our favorite villain here at PC) and long commutes. Under utilized public transportation. The list goes on and on and on.... and rectifying a lot of these problems would reduce our standard of living by a tiny amount, yet would have a huge impact. You can bet your arse that when petro costs start to rise many of these things will be implemented in rapid order and people everywhere will embrace them because they won't have much choice. Failure to do so will really cut into the average joe's standard of living.