Post Carbon in Eugene

First, here's a picture of the 1991 Geo metro that I bought on Friday.
There is another shot of it next to my trailer and some thoughts about why buy it on the Aftershock main website here.
I met three of the Post Carbon group in Eugene yesterday at a quick meeting out at Kevin's farm near the Willamette river. Doug, Denise, Kevin and I talked about where Doug would like to put the efforts of the Post Carbon group in the immediate future. More, it was a chance for me to see how wide the subject is, and how exhausting.

I tried last night to get my thoughts straight. Why was I there at all? I guess I'm what is known in the Peak oil circles as a "doomer." I have not yet found any confidence, plan, or suggestion that takes our current society and moves it through the loss of free and easy, hell, magical, oil to a lower energy future without deadly, enormous disruption. That does not mean that I am not looking for the path for me, and my close people. But yes, I'm a doomer and remain unconvinced about people's ability to change, and about the very structure of this machine civilization to transmute to a non machine civilization.

In the short time that the four of us met yesterday, with a larger meeting coming on Tuesday, I found several viewpoints that really reflect that all four of us came to that point in the greenhouse from very different directions. Doug is a methodical activist seeking change in practical ways through the political system as it really exists. It is a very slow process and he chips away at the entrenched Chamber of Commerce machine that controls even a small thing like a Peak Oil resolution - which Portland has already done!
Denise represents a Peak Oil person who has already made changes based on what she has learned, relocating herself and her husband to Eugene. Kevin is living the life that is probably the only real choice in 50 years. A very nearly completely self sufficient farm on 23 acres that supplies almost every need and creates a surplus. I enjoyed basking in his energy because it is calm, quiet and directed, as most people who work physically hard seem to possess.

The consensus was that relocalization is the key to future community change. Learning to grow, buying food locally, supporting the structures that will still exist when the Walmart trucks roll less often and the price of gas isolates you where you are.
But what did I feel about all of this? Was I bouyed with new hope and enthusiasm? I was devestated that there is no consensus of the smallest of issues. Anyone who has the courage to not flinch and look away, anyone who begins the process of self education about energy finally one day realizes there are at least already 4 billion more people than the earth can carry, and second, that every political system in the world is the wrong tool for getting through this. The political systems are the problems. They are exactly how we got in this mess, and whoever is left at the end of the next 80 years will probably not fondly remember us, those people who used the most magical gift of the 120 million years of earth oil production in 150 years. And, we did it with no view of the future and of the time when it would be gone. We have been very bad dogs. Unfortunately our political systems exist to preserve the status quo. Investement, ROI, exist on stability - that tomorrow will have the same cheap energy as today. Some of the smartest people I know personally can simply not look at this, can not entertain running out and the business model collapsing, investment collapsing, debt overwhelming them as the bills of nearly free energy are called in.
I and those people see the future that would work here in the Willamette valley - Kevin's farm in a wonderful model of what will be common, among those left in 2082 (when oil becomes a collector's item - maybe we'll sell it on a primitive version of local ebay by the cup then?). But how to reach across from massive belief that this party can go on forever? We could be using the last half of oil reserves (the very hard to get last half) to build sustainable energy, wind, and solar at the local level on every home, as Cuba is currently doing. They are pumping oil from off shore and selling it, using the proceeds to buy and build solar panels for every school and eventually all rural homes. It is not much power, enough for a light bulb and a radio. That's it. But I can personally tell you, there is a huge difference between no power and even a very little bit of power.
But I was in Las Vegas two weeks ago as blog readers know, and there was no sign that anyone can stop. The machine is self perpetuating, and those that control investment can not accept the physical laws and math that you learned in 1st grade. You have three apples and subtract two apples and you have one apple. Oil was a two time event in geological history, I have read, 90 million years ago, and 120 million years ago. Find it all, pump it all, wait a few hundred million years and maybe there will be more. From now until then, no oil.
I hope to learn more from these people, and I strangely am driven to make people look right at it. It's bad enough that we used it all in completely stupid ways, but then to not have the balls to look at the what we did and the coming result? Somehow we have to let it in, if only to grief it's loss. If you want to wait until you are like a little baby rabbit saying "what happened, what happened, it's not fair!!!" then we have not matured as a species at all. We have to stare right at it, do the best with what is left, and accept that we have been, since the dawn of agriculture, the problem on this planet, not the solution. I would just like us all to look, and then have the grace to say, "oops." And then use what is left to build a sustainable new world. Whatever I think or you think, whether you bothered to read this far or not, the end of oil comes because the pumps are running.