Michael Janzen

I had lunch with an old friend form Willits, California today. Willits is a small town in Mendocino County, California where highway 101 stops being a freeway and turns back into a main street. I used to live nearby so I thought I had a pretty good sense for the place. It sounds like the town has had a bit of an awakening.

My first tip-off to this change was buried in a movie where Willits was featured as a town prepping for peak oil. The movie is The End of Surburbia and is a must see movie. The segment on Willits is about 10 minutes long and starts at 1 hour 21 minutes into the movie. My friend confirmed that much of the town is in fact, prepping for peak oil, by simply focusing on creating a local sustainable economy independent from outside resources. You can learn about this grass roots movement at the Willits Economic Localization website.

Hearing this not only made me homesick for Mendocino County but it also made me feel a little less crazy.  I think it’s also important to point out that it’s just common sense to focus on strengthening our local communities. When we focus on finding sustainable self-sufficient solutions together we increase our resiliency and ability to thrive under good and bad times.

I really applaud the folks up in Willits, and other communities moving in this direction, for their foresightedness and bravery for leading the way.

I was shocked to see news of Peak Oil in the Wall Street Journal this morning. I hope it helps begin to break loose new conversations on this taboo topic, the inevitable energy crisis brought on by the exhaustion of cheap oil reserves.

I say inevitable because there will be a day when worldwide oil production begins to decline as the cost to extract the remaining fossil fuels becomes too expensive. I have no doubt that the world will make a transition to renewable energy sources as we run out of gas but no one can predict accurately what this transition period will look like.

My humble opinion is that if each of us move toward an environmentally and economically sustainable lifestyle now, we position ourselves perfectly for whatever the future has in store, good and bad. In other words, the best way to end our civilization’s addiction to oil is for each of us to end OUR PERSONAL addiction to oil.

Wall Street Journal: The Next Crisis: Prepare for Peak Oil

This is an excellent video of a presentation by Jeff Rubin at The Business of Climate Change Conference 2009. I’m not sure if I agree with his predictions but it is concerning to hear someone with his credible references speaking so bluntly about how the looming transition off oil is going to affect how we live. Here’s a quote from the YouTube video description.

“Jeff Rubin, the former Chief Economist of CIBC World Markets and the author of Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller built his reputation as one of Canada’s top economists based on a number of successful predictions including the housing bust of the early 90s and the rise of oil prices. In his recent book, Mr. Rubin predicts $225 per barrel oil by 2012 and with it the end of globalization, a movement towards local sourcing and a need for massive scaling up of energy efficiency.”

Last night I watched the movie Escape from Suburbia on Netflix. As the movie started it seemed like a lot of Peak Oil movies as it rattled off all the scary statistics and doomer predictions. I found myself kind of rolling my eyes a few times but as the movie continued I was happy to see the movie tell the positive story we may find at the end of the end-of-oil rainbow… which is that a sustainable, self-sufficient, community-focused life will be a nice way to live so long as we can get across the gap left behind when we run low on gas.

Escape from Suburbia isn’t the best documentary I’ve seen on Peak Oil but it’s worth watching. If you have a Netflix account you may be able to watch it online like I did.

No I have not gone completely off the deep end and this is supposed to be a funny post… but if this turns out to be real… I’ll be a very happy psycho nut-job.

It seems, from this article in the Examiner, that the governments of the world have been in top secret meetings discussing the presence of intelligent alien life and how and when to officially disclose that fact to the public.

In a nutshell, pun intended, the prediction is that “Obama is planning to disclose the reality of ET contact by the end of the year; and that most, but not all, of the ET visitors are friendly.”

So just for a millisecond lets assume this is true… it would be excellent timing because most of humanity needs a wake up call to the fact that we have an amazing little blue planet that needs to be better cared for. Being able to see ourselves through another set of sentient (and vastly more technically advanced) might just do the trick and move that mountain.

I guess time will tell if this news story is just crazy talk or the real deal. In the mean time I’ll continue my personal work to evolve into a better human.

This is a crazy paranoid conspiracy theory-like thought I had while watching the movie Food, Inc. tonight on Netflix. Could the government’s massive subsidization of America’s industrial food complex be a peak oil prep? Seems logical if you follow my logic… if the food supply were in fewer hands it would be easier to maintain at massive levels during tough times. So politicians may think that supporting these massive corporations is simply a hedge against hard times.

You can’t change our civilization overnight. Since most people don’t have the skills to feed themselves and only know how to push a shopping cart and choose between paper and plastic, the only way to feed them during a widespread catastrophe would be to build a centrally managed infrastructure that produced enough food for everyone.

Photo credit wikipedia commons.

This could also explain why our government supports and protects factory farming with subsidies and a wide array of legal shields. Our politicians might be thinking that they are protecting us by protecting factory farming and that all this manufactured food is actually going to be the thing that saves our lives when we run out of gas.

Some may say that factory farming would topple when oil reserves dwindle but my guess is the first industry to be given a disproportionately large fuel ration would be industrial food manufacturers. If things got that bad protecting factory farms would theoretically become a matter of national security.

Encouraging people to learn how to grow their own food is probably an unreasonable plan at this point in time simply due to the massive urban and suburban population centers we’ve developed. To move our people toward a truly sustainable lifestyle would mean spreading us out geographically so we had enough space around us to grow our own food.

Now let me take the paranoid conspiracy theory out of it.

The real question each of us should ask is what are we each doing to make happiness and prosperity more sustainable for ourselves, families, and communities? Here’s are a few ideas:

• Stop hoping that someone in Washington DC is going to fix this mess for us.
• Fix it for ourselves by choosing to live a more sustainable lifestyle.
• Become more self-sufficient and begin disconnecting from the industrial complex.
• Consume less so we can move more of our personal resources to things that support a sustainable lifestyle.
• Downsize and conserve because it saves money and reduces risk.

Making a simple happy life a priority isn’t crazy. Conspiracy theories will make you crazy. Try not to spend too much time dwelling on what might be happening and instead turn your energy toward fixing the problem which starts with a heart to heart conversation with the person you see in the mirror.

I just finished reading World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler. It’s a story about what life might be like if we were to run out of gas and experience a global economic collapse. As a novel it’s captivating and an entertaining quick read if you can stomach the topic in general. As a prediction of the future World Made by Hand is just one of the infinite possible scenarios we might experience if we were to suddenly run out of oil.

But before you discard the idea of reading a book about the end of the world as we know it let me point out some of the values and lessons I found written between the lines that could be immediately applied to our lives today.

Self-Sufficiency – Corporations, government, international trade, global communications, and manufacturing in a World Made by Hand have shut down simply because the economic infrastructure, once powered by oil, has collapsed. Since the vast majority of people had built lives on a reliance on oil it’s no wonder the entire civilization was brought to its knees.

The lesson is that when we accept fewer single points of failure in our lives we reduce the risk of being forced to live through hard times. The recent severe recession has been a good example of how something simple, like job loss, can disrupt and destroy lives. When the vast majority of people accept the same single point of failure the problem amplifies. So then logically if an entire civilization was built on one of these fault lines it would tend to collapse when normalcy was unsettled.

When each of us works to become more self-sufficient we reduce the risk of life disrupting events for ourselves. As more people choose to reduce single points of failure the entire society becomes less likely to collapse.

Sustainability – The characters in World Made by Hand have been essentially forced by circumstance to adopt sustainable lifestyles. This is simply because sustainability really describes life sustaining choices and when people are faced with survival situations people either choose to live in balance with their natural resources or use them up and move on. If people choose to use them up they inevitably die because out-pacing natural resources simply eliminates life sustaining systems like water and food.

The lesson here is that if we choose to live more sustainably we increase the chances that humanity will persist. The problems we are beginning to experience are due to the fact that we’ve out-paced our natural resources and only through our cleverness and reliance of oil have been able to increase food production, hold disease at bay, and keep water clean enough to drink. But at some point it is conceivable that we will hit a wall or one of the single points of failure will break causing a collapse like Kunstler describes in this novel if not enough people come together and choose sustainability.

Community – Something similar to tribalism emerges in World Made by Hand. Kunstler paints a picture of emerging factions with strong leaders, some who strive for freedom and others who greedily seek power.

The lesson is that when people choose to embrace diversity and come together under commonalities the combined group becomes stronger and overall prosperity increases. When they choose to isolate themselves and cut off ties with others and focus on their differences they weaken and ultimately fail after a period of short-term prosperity.

Conclusion

Even if you have no concern or belief that we may be facing trouble when we run out oil this book is a good read and convincing illustration of how society works, albeit in a fictional story. It can also spark some introspection into personal values and lifestyle choices. I highly recommend reading World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler.

I spent the better part of last week traveling to Los Angeles on business. Julia and Katie came with me so we decided to drive and turn it into a mini vacation. As we drove down I-5 and then onto the 405 in Los Angeles I could not help but think about what that place would be like after we run out of gas. I really try not to dwell in negative stuff like this but I think it’s important to understand the issue and then turn to positive actions.

I found this great documentary on YouTube produced by ABC Science. Most of the Peak Oil stuff you’ll find online is heavily biased with survivalism and end of the world fear mongering. The net effect of this fear-based communication strategy is that the general public turns a blind eye to the issue. This is a problem if Peak Oil is upon us because too many people will be caught off guard.

I’m not going to blab on about my personal take on Peak Oil. Instead I’m going to encourage you to watch this documentary. Below are all the segments.

Back in 2005 I launched a website that was part car blog and free classifieds; but it never went anywhere. A few years ago I completely lost interest in cars because I came to the realization that they were one of the key elements leading to the potential demise of our civilization.

OK, OK, I know that sounds a little crazy… OK, OK, a lot crazy… but here’s my thinking:

1. Cars burn gas.
2. Cars are becoming more common place around the globe.
3. More gas is being burned everyday as more people drive cars.
4. Gas is a fossil fuel.
5. Fossil fuels are a non-renewable natural resource.
6. We will run out of oil.
7. Oil is the life blood of the global economy.
8. People naturally change slowly.
9. When we run out of oil most people will be taken by surprise.
10. The forced sudden change will cause a major disruption across the globe.

Fossil fuels are such an enormous part of our world today that when it finally becomes scarce it is only logical that big change will be a reality. I think it will be sudden because the people that own the oil will want to continue to keep profits high until they run out of gas. There is no business justificaiton to give us warning. There is a business justification to put more profits into alternatives to oil.

For example we’ve seen an enormous increase in coal mining and America has one of the largest coal reserves in the world. Today 50% of our electricity comes from burning coal. It’s too bad the energy companies and our government didn’t choose to put more effort into renewable resources. Now we can look forward to peak oil and peak coal.

When all this peaking comes down I don’t think will not be the end of civilization, but i do think it will bring about some very tough times. Our lifestyles will be forced to change. Where we get our food, how we live, where we live, and how we get around will all need to adjust during this period of time between running out of fossil fuels and inventing new renewable energy sources.

The length of this gap will be determined by combination of things like human ingenuity, global conflicts, corporate and government policies, and our own personal choices. Since we have the most influence over our own choices it seems like that’s a great place to start to prepare. We can begin making lifestyle changes now and become more self-sufficient and learn live more sustainability. We can also choose to change how we travel and how often.

This is the kind of thinking that recently inspired me to begin blogging about post-peak oil transportation options. I’ll cover thing like electric cars, air-powered cars, plug-in hybrids, and human-powered machines.

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Imagine a world connected by a decentralized power grid. If we began installing grid-tied solar panels on every roof now we might just win the race to peak oil too.

The infrastructure is already set-up except for a place to store the extra power… oh yeah electric cars! We could store all that spare electricity in our cars. Imagine an world with millions of electric cars running around. Things would be a lot quieter and yes we’d need to look both ways before we cross the street.

The truth is that electric cars and range-extended electric cars will be hitting the roads in 2010. Hopefully their arrival will coincide with an economic recovery so the companies building them will succeed.

I can dream right?