OK, let me say this before I continue - I don't believe that it's all going to hit the fan and be as bad as... I WISH it would be. That would, after all, justify my seemingly crazy actions over the past 4 years...

There are too many of us out there that are quietly and patiently waiting for things to change for the better. A certain amount of chaos is inevitable (and good) in my opinion... It makes people take a step back and re-evaluate what is important and what isn't. The problem is that the people most likely to step back and re-evaluate their situation are likely to be from a country other than America. Americans are typically too busy to notice things like wars for oil resources and the like. Oh wait, didn't we happen to bury a deep oil pipeline from somewhere in the middle-east through Afghanistan as part of our war on terror? Shit, I can't remember because they dropped that story to announce that the new PS3 just came out with the new HD Blue Ray technology. Apparently they're hard to find because they only produced a fraction of what was needed to fill demand for Christmas. Nobody wants to pay the high prices the scammers on eBay that bought them all up are charging (damn scammers - there ought to be a law). When people get their hands on one they won't have to feel like asses for buying those HD Plasma Big Screen TV's because the Blue Ray games are only really worth playing on a big screen HD TV. I sure am glad that the economy is back on track... Maybe I should sell my big house before the housing bubble pops and I'm even more upside down on my 2nd mortgage... <rolling eyes> We're not going to suffer much more than we already are - unfortunately...

I wish the huge corporations would finish sucking every last penny out of everyone. I really do. Then they could merge/buyout/bankrupt themselves into a few MEGA Corporations and fizzle out as the masses of average Americans go into MEGA debt... The great global equalizer. It's going that direction - we're already seeing it on all levels. Even the country itself is upside down on it's (our) loans and has been for way too long. Watch as homes, the cornerstone of the American dream, become less valuable than the money paid for them. Oh yeah, they've been that way for a couple of decades now... As resources become scarce, the CEOs will bail out with their golden parachutes and leave the working class scrambling for more work elsewhere to hang on to the American dream. Unfortunately, everyone can have a "platinum" card these days. It used to mean something to have a "platinum" card. I get offered "platinum" cards with 23% interest and a $50.00 annual fee - I'm a huge risk - they're getting desperate now. That means the end of seemingly endless debt is near...

There's a lot of possible outcomes ahead - most of them NOT all that bad (for the greedy American masses anyway). My personal belief is that all it will take is a few changes to remove the power grubbing mega corporations from running things into the ground. Remove the bullshit designed to keep people like me and you from having any control. Curtail the never ending cycle of debt spending. Suspend the patent/copyright BS so that innovative folks can make a living and bring out new products to the marketplace that solve problems and improve on the junk that's out there now. If the government doesn't step in to change the corporate driven American economy (and they probably can't at this point) then it's likely that an underground movement will occur to circumvent the laws and regulations that keep us from saving ourselves. Tell me if you know someone that isn't already bypassing the system in some way. Barter is smarter - so to speak. If you are not already part of the underground, you will be eventually - that's my new mantra.

You need to put the power back in the hands of the people. We're at the mercy of our own creation. Big businesses don't solve problems until there's money in it. No new ideas until the old ideas stop making money hand over fist or (in the case of "innovative" corporations) they predict a loss of profits in the very near future and start changing things in small increments to keep profits high. What's in it for GM if they introduce an electric car that solves all of the problems for 90% of the population right away? They need to introduce it piece by piece - If I were GM and interested in max profits I'd want to introduce highly innovative products in stages to maximize profits. Follow my logic here... If I want to maximize profits, I sell a car that gets better gas mileage than previous models. The consumers that want an energy efficient alternative buy the most energy efficient car they can. Then a few years later I introduce a hybrid electric car. Consumers go to the car lot and trade in their gas cars for ones that have the words electric, hybrid, biodiesel, hydrogen or whatever in the title because they want an energy efficient alternative to the gas car they bought a few years ago. I sell them the hybrid car at a premium price and point out the long term savings as justification to them to pay more. A few years later, I introduce a super hybrid that gets 4 times the gas mileage, but at a limited range before it switches over to standard mileage fuel economy. Standard hybrid owners trade up (at a significantly high cost and low trade in value of course) to take advantage of the long term savings. Finally a few years later I introduce the fully electric car. No gas needed. I've prepped the consumer already with the limited range - they realize that they hardly ever go very far on a daily basis and happily trade in their super hybrid cars for a fully electric vehicle (at a substantial cost yet again). I only do this last stage after I have ensured that the batteries and maintenance are proprietary and can only be done by an authorized dealer that pays a premium to me for the right to service the cars... So, even if GM has an electric car already (and they have for MANY years - http://www.gmev.com/ - remember the EV1?), They roll out the electric car in stages, train the public to accept it and tout themselves as an innovator of technology while they sell the public 4, 5 or 6 cars in the process. Check out the movie "Who killed the electric car" for a very infuriating (but enlightening) evening of alternative energy entertainment... The technology has been in place for a long time, but there's no good money in it yet... Wait until gas is $5-$7.00 a gallon - then the public will be ripe for picking and GM and others will make a killing trading in those worthless SUVs for overpriced EV2s.

Hmmm, come to think of it, if I was SONY and had some new technology, I'd introduce it in stages - Beta, 8mm, CD, DVD then maybe call it "blue laser" or "gamma ray" or something like that by stage 4 so it sounds innovative. Ever wonder what happened to DAT tapes? Too good a technology too soon - no control - they pulled from the market because it was everything the consumer wanted - too much power - and profit would have been lost. The same game is played by every corporation that has any brains. Trade in your old DVD's cuz "Blue Ray" is the next hybrid/electric techno do-dad you just have to have to be anyone in this country. For those of us paying attention out there - we run screaming from all of it - it's a 7-9 year cycle and people fall for it EVERY TIME. No business escapes - not even medicine - aren't we due for something new in medicine besides breast implants and laik surgery? The technology is way past Blue Ray - why are people suckered? I stay only 5 years behind now and I get everything for little to nothing as everyone else trades up. Good for me that there are a lot of brainwashed folks out there supplying me with their outdated do-dads.

We need an express route for innovative ideas to get to the public. The internet is a great tool, but it's not as powerful as radio or TV is (yet) at getting into every living room, workplace and automobile. Open a free public channel dedicated to new technology and information on how to carve out a nice chunk of the future for yourself. There are 1000s of ideas out there right now that could help us change gracefully from oil to alternative (renewable) energy resources. The problem is that unless there's money to be made sharing those ideas and bringing them into the public domain, there will be no effort made to tap into those resources. It's up to you and I to get those ideas out into the general publics view and offer them up as alternatives to giving up or preparing for the worst - and we have to do it all for ourselves... Corporations are even taking over our blogs now - thousands of bloggers out there are filling the internet with paid advertisements for companies. I love your section on your solar project - because it focuses mostly on solutions instead of problems.

Some well placed money and freedom to let the little guys have a say (and freedom to do) and you'd find a lot more optimistic outlook for the future. Big business has been basically running everything for a few decades now. The end result is the current situation - greedy, needy, hopelessly in debt - both the nation as a whole and just about every living breathing American. We're all spoon fed that we need a new big screen Plasma HD TV with a Blue Ray player and iPod interface (so you can take your tv with you everywhere course)... Want to wake everyone up from the consumer coma really quick? Remove credit from the equation. Make everyone give back everything they don't own outright. Barring that, offer a better solution than that increasingly expensive energy sucking toy that everyone just "has to have" to stay "up to date", "cool" or "on the cutting edge". Make being socially responsible cool - flip off the folks in the Hummers and praise the old car drivers for being socially responsible. Make it socially unacceptable to spend beyond your means and OK to not be rich again. Funny that I'm a bad parent in some folks eyes because I choose to stay home with my kids instead of going to a cubicle every day to make money... The current brainwashed masses need a wake up call. "If it isn't paid for it's not yours" would be a great bumper sticker to make my point. Want to change things - you have to fight the media with your own media or use the "build it and they will come" philosophy.

Start an alternative living community damn it! A small group could show the country how to live it up and consume next to nothing while doing it! Show folks the good life and then show them the non-existent bills. Set up high speed internet and intranet and share resources among the community freely or with a co-op type attitude. Remove the stigma and social stereotype from it all. There's nothing wrong with a big screen TV if you pay for it outright and you can afford to run it on your own power. A small group of innovators could start something that would change the way people think of green living. You don't have to live in a trailer, dress in a grass skirt or shit in a bucket to live green, but that's what people think because the media focuses on the people that are WAY out there. You shouldn't be able to tell that the community is 100% green just by looking. OK, maybe no grease in the driveways... It should be invisible to everyone for the most part. Build it and they will come... I'd bet everything I own (and I basically am anyway) that if a group started small self contained (i.e. 100% "green" utility option) community and kept it open and right in the public's eye that they would have people begging them to become part of it in no-time... People are fed up with living expenses getting endlessly higher and being forever stuck with whatever gets fed to them. Ask anyone what they would do if the electric companies (nation wide) raised their rates tomorrow so that utility bills jumped 500%. They'd complain to each other and bitch and whine and demand something be done and jump up and down and fret and... and... and then pay the bill. After a while if wages didn't increase to meet the new expense they'd change their habits and get rid of high energy devices - it will become cheaper to switch to greener appliances and alternative energy sources. Companies would see the drop in sales on high wattage devices and follow suit by offering low/no wattage alternatives. People would make sacrifices in order to make ends meet. Or worst case - they lose everything they didn't pay for in the first place. Most people are hopelessly stuck. They're owned by everything they own and therefore can't do anything but comply with whatever is demanded of them. Sad, but 3 decades of "credit gone wild" has to end sometime.

I can go into a lot of detail on why I don't think it's going to hit the fan... The main reason is simple - we can't assume everything will stay the same while the world falls apart. It doesn't work like that. People will not be driving 30 minutes a day shelling out $12-$30.00 a gallon to drive to work until the bitter end. As prices for gas increase people will start taking the bus, or riding their bikes, or carpooling or migrate closer to their place of work or work from home. They'll have to - no option out clause for them. It's not like the lights will go out and everyone will be sitting around going "what happened". I wish that were true (I am after all a sick puppy) and would love to watch it all on CNN via satellite from the desert with you. Problem is that we look at the situation from a pedestal. After all we are Americans. Aren't we smarter than everyone else? Nope. Greedy dumbasses. 3/4 of the world exists just fine without all of the crap we're used to getting on a daily basis - they don't have credit cards they buy what they can afford to barter or pay for outright. Remove credit from the equation and world equality would take on a whole new meaning. Don't you think rationing will take place LONG before the lights go out permanently - and the lights won't go out - or it's total anarchy - and anarchists don't pay taxes...

So, where was I headed with this... I guess I wanted to offer a different point of view on the subject of peak oil and the end of the world. Say "Hi". Try to convince you to use your powers for good <sarcastic grin>. I don't know.

If the steaming shitplie from hell does hit the fan someday... You know I'll be somewhere unplugged from the grid, sitting on my couch, drinking a homebrew & watching the whole nightmare unfold on HD LCD big screen satellite TV (in Spanish with English subtitles of course). Yeah, I'm a sick, sick fuck - You're invited.

Your friend - "He who must not be named" <laughing>

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COMMENTS:

January 11, 2007.from alan.
So here are points I can pick out of Gary's diatribe. I'm not going to try and take apart every point where I have a disagreement, only those that I think are common assumptions among many people. Each of you has the right to make all of us think. I hope Gary's article at least got a couple of good discussions going.
Gary's test is in bold.

We're not going to suffer much more than we already are – unfortunately...
I strongly disagree. Gary works the idea of our society as an complex that can be changed here and there without affecting the whole. It is exactly the cascade effect that will make this worse beyond my comprehension. When a localized resource go scarce, or goes up in price, the first effect won't be just on gas prices but on every single point of production within the system, transport, construction, fabrication, fertilizer, everything that uses oil to provide energy or the raw materials of creation. That is not just gas, that is your job going poof. You won't have to worry about driving to work, there will be no work except for the desperate government attempts to hold everything together. So you might as well work for the government until it too does not make it's payroll. Ask your local cop how long he will go to work without being paid? The failures of complex systems is chaotic. I cannot guess what will happen and in what order, but it will not be a change to your lifestyle, it is a change to how you live in every aspect.

My personal belief is that all it will take is a few changes to remove the power grubbing mega corporations from running things into the ground.
A change from capitalism to a democracy is not just a few changes, this is revolution. First you have to take control away from the corporations – which means destroy them so that they cannot control by the control of all resources, then you have to build a democracy with a people who are not used to seeking out solutions but really best at deciding who they like on some reality show. This is not just a few changes and I don't think this will work.

If the government doesn't step in to change the corporate driven American economy (and they probably can't at this point) then it's likely that an underground movement will occur to circumvent the laws and regulations that keep us from saving ourselves.
I think underground movements already exist but their energy, money, commitment comes from a symbiotic or parasitic relationship to a “energy” society. The energy is going away, most movements will die with the body of the beast.

You need to put the power back in the hands of the people. We're at the mercy of our own creation. Big businesses don't solve problems until there's money in it.
Agreed. Capitalism is what a theory of constant expansion and use of cheap labor and cheap resources. We are now at the hard edge of our little petri dish. Capitalism is no longer the answer, and big business is the enemy of innovation.


We need an express route for innovative ideas to get to the public. The internet is a great tool, but it's not as powerful as radio or TV is (yet) at getting into every living room, workplace and automobile. Open a free public channel dedicated to new technology and information on how to carve out a nice chunk of the future for yourself. There are 1000s of ideas out there right now that could help us change gracefully from oil to alternative (renewable) energy resources.
Agreed, we are all smarter than any one of us. But who will use their energy, personal, solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, whatever renewable, because there won't be gas and oil, to connect us and give us a forum. How will we create this method of communication?

Some well placed money and freedom to let the little guys have a say (and freedom to do) and you'd find a lot more optimistic outlook for the future. Big business has been basically running everything for a few decades now. The end result is the current situation - greedy, needy, hopelessly in debt - both the nation as a whole and just about every living breathing American.
Pouring dollars to the “little guy” requires some group to decide who gets it. Doesn't work. I think the only hope is a revolution before the oil runs out. The oil is the money. Never before has a single item come to represent food on your table, and the currency you use to exchange your labor for goods. The point of this website for me is to get you moving towards self-sufficiency while there is still a flow of liquid energy to do so. Realize that it takes about 8 gallons of oil to make a crystalline solar panel.

Want to wake everyone up from the consumer coma really quick? Remove credit from the equation. Make everyone give back everything they don't own outright. Barring that, offer a better solution than that increasingly expensive energy sucking toy that everyone just "has to have" to stay "up to date", "cool" or "on the cutting edge".
Credit is part of a world wide agreement. I agree we will wake up only when the credit collapses, and then the stores will be empty and the US will be a flea market for decades, stripping the suburbs for items that are no longer available or unaffordable except by trade for the individual.

Make being socially responsible cool - flip off the folks in the Hummers and praise the old car drivers for being socially responsible. "If it isn't paid for it's not yours" would be a great bumper sticker to make my point. Want to change things - you have to fight the media with your own media or use the "build it and they will come" philosophy.
Agreed wholeheartedly. Offer an alternative to people who see you, and they know the alternative exists and can choose it when they have to.

Start an alternative living community damn it! A small group could show the country how to live it up and consume next to nothing while doing it! Show folks the good life and then show them the non-existent bills. Set up high speed internet and intranet and share resources among the community freely or with a co-op type attitude. Remove the stigma and social stereotype from it all.
This would have to be created in the now, while energy was available. All new alternative technologies require oil to build them and transport them and put them in place. People have to be fed, gardens planted seeds shipped. UPS has to still work, all this is now, but not later. If you have similar ideas it would really help if you were storing the tools and materials, solar panels and electronics, that will be crucial during the change. Internet may persist, I don't know. At least for a while it will. It will certainly become more localized. I don't know how we will keep computers working without the world wide dependence on Chinese manufacturing (that's where all your computers come from). Our next oil resource war after we divide up the middle east will likely be with China. They want the same thing we want, and they want more of it all the time - oil.

There's nothing wrong with a big screen TV if you pay for it outright and you can afford to run it on your own power. A small group of innovators could start something that would change the way people think of green living. You don't have to live in a trailer, dress in a grass skirt or shit in a bucket to live green, but that's what people think because the media focuses on the people that are WAY out there. You shouldn't be able to tell that the community is 100% green just by looking. OK, maybe no grease in the driveways... It should be invisible to everyone for the most part. Build it and they will come... I'd bet everything I own (and I basically am anyway) that if a group started small self contained (i.e. 100% "green" utility option) community and kept it open and right in the public's eye that they would have people begging them to become part of it in no-time...
I disagree. You will have to live a much much smaller energy life I think. Jared Diamond in his second book which seems exhaustively researched, makes the point that finally you have to “spend” in energy only what sunlight falls on the earth. with maybe a little geothermal thrown in. He computes that if we weren't feeding people with oil (8 grams of oil grows one gram of carbohydrate), that we could really carry only about 500 million people worldwide. I can't remember the exact numbers. But the yardstick you must use, is that the top soil doesn't deplete but increases (that is sunlight you don't get to use), and that people will use the power they use today. 500 million, not 6.5 billion. So maybe if we shit in a bucket, which we certainly should, and have woven grass skirts (personally looking forward to it), maybe we can carry a billion? This is what most people who explore these thoughts come to, and the difference between 6.5 billion and one billion is called the “die off.”
I would like all the free chickies to work on solutions for those who will be left, the failure is just too complex to call. That is why I say, be light on your feet and flexible. You will not being doing what you are doing today in five years (that's my opinion, we have less than five years of our current energy richness and priveleged place in world material goods).

Most people are hopelessly stuck. They're owned by everything they own and therefore can't do anything but comply with whatever is demanded of them. Sad, but 3 decades of "credit gone wild" has to end sometime.
I agree, as my friend Garth pointed out to me in his smooth way some time ago. It's not the oil you idiot, it is the credit collapse coming. I think they are inexorably tied.
The time to worry about clean air, C02 emissions, and global warming was 100 years ago. Now is preparation time for a different, uncertain future, and it is certainly going to be a lower energy future. I live in that world right now, and it is not very bad at all, though I fear for Gary's HD wide screen LCD TV. Who is going to build it and what is going to transmit to it? I love the “credit gone wild” idea though. Maybe girls could pull up their tops and shows us their TITS (total indebtedness tabulation sheets).

I can go into a lot of detail on why I don't think it's going to hit the fan... The main reason is simple - we can't assume everything will stay the same while the world falls apart. It doesn't work like that. Remove credit from the equation and world equality would take on a whole new meaning.
I agree but have a different conclusion. It will all change and yes rationing will be tried and it will save a little fuel for the short run, but our energy machine runs only on expansion, and less energy equal jobs lost immediately which begins the credit crumble which is the end of times for a sales driven capitalist society (world). There will be a whole new world and that is exactly what the “shit hits the fan” means to me.

So, where was I headed with this... I guess I wanted to offer a different point of view on the subject of peak oil and the end of the world. Say "Hi". Try to convince you to use your powers for good <sarcastic grin>. I don't know.

If the steaming shitpile from hell does hit the fan someday... You know I'll be somewhere unplugged from the grid, sitting on my couch, drinking a home brew & watching the whole nightmare unfold on HD LCD big screen satellite TV (in Spanish with English subtitles of course). Yeah, I'm a sick, sick fuck - You're invited.
I'm trying too, to use my little thoughts for good, and this is one hard subject when you get into collapse scenarios.

What is there to say good about it? We do have a chance to build something new, but the change will have to come, not through innovation of our current sort – technological, but rather through what we decide to want. We have to want a different relationship with each other, with each living thing, and with the planet. We have to become attuned to building up instead of leveling and constructing, and we have to stop seeing ourselves as the recipient of all the planet's bounty. We are just a little piece of this world and we have to start acting like it. We will move back from the hard edge of the petri dish, and we will have a much smaller population with appetites for joy instead of fear of loss.

That is the new world that I plan for, think about. I hope you, Gary, invent a cheap solar cell that I can build at home, but for me I want to build a new way of low energy, big hearted, fun, dancing, living that rejoices in the way things taste, and deal with life and death as natural processes We have a little while, as the oil still flows to forget this world, and envision and create a new one. It starts with where we focus. Focus out in front, we will live or die in the collapse or transmutation that comes, but what we do now gives the alternative that awaits us, and your children. So in all, I agree with you. Create your community, go underground against the corporations who bemuse us while they destroy and consume the very things we need to make this transformation work – energy. I expect this new future and if you expect it we will surely create it.

Thanks, Gary for the thoughts, I look forward to more if you will.
Alan