El Gringo

These are some notes from an article by Katherine Mieszkowski.  It discusses planting gardens and drafting city plans for the days when oil is gone.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/03/22/peakoil/print.html

A report on Peak Oil released in February 2005, known as the Hirsch Report, plays out three scenarios: Wait for the peak to occur before transitioning, plan a decade ahead, plan 20 years ahead.  Only the third scenario concludes that major liquid fuel shortages could be avoided.

We have a problem that has no real solution, and we are trying to mitigate what will happen to culture.  Some predict we are going back to the 13^th century at some point – this is significant !!  It is going to be more third world-like and people are going to need to cope.

Cities will start to struggle to provide basic services such as police, firefighting, public transport, water, road repair and other community services. 

Office workers will lose jobs as businesses flounder under the strain of a failing global economy.

We cling to the vain hope that better fuel efficiency, more conservation and alternative energy will step in and save the day.  The myth of biofuels – the likes of ethanol, fuel from crops like corn and switchgrass are not going to save the day.  We would not be able to produce the same amount of energy that we now get from 85 millions barrels of oil a day.  Sheer volume aside, we will end up overmining the soil. 

As energy gets more expensive, food will get more expensive.  Bio-intensive farming methods require 4,000 sq feet of land to produce enough food to feed a vegetarian diet to one person.

Some communities are already developing policies and infrastructure to become energy and food self-reliant.  Convert school yards into a farm for healthy food in the cafeteria, put farms next to hospitals.  Find local sources for electricity.

For individuals, having land and the ability to produce your own food is going to become very important.

 We will need to adapt, not necessarily technically but rather socially.

Watch this space! This is important.  Even to those that consider themselves energy conscious, this is something that is going to significantly affect everyone of us in a large way.  The biggest danger as I see it, and that so many articles discuss, is that Peak Oil seems so far away that it won’t affect us or isn’t something we have to really worry about.  Wrong. And this is not something that we should passively sit back from and assume that the “experts” will sort out for us.   I don’t want to go down the doomsday path on this but from what I have been learning, it is certainly going to have a very significant impact on our lives.  I think it is totally important to be planning seriously for this now.  The idea here is to build up a picture of what the issues are and what we really should be doing about it, in order to preserve ourselves as individuals and as a community.