Nine Meals From Anarchy is the article on the website of the Daily Mail today. It’s a look by a mainstream news organization at the many levels of trouble rising oil prices will force on us. Though the article discusses the Britain’s perspective on the problem, the same economic catastrophe is bearing down on us in the U.S. right now. Maybe even more difficult.
Britain is a smaller company geographically, with a well-developed system of public transportation. Americans have no such system. The article on Mail Online however, is about food transportation, not about public transportation. A great bus and rail system doesn’t mean a thing if there’s no food.
If the trucks stopped moving, we’d start to worry and we’d head out to the shops, cking up our larders. By the end of Day One, if there was still no petrol, the shelves would be looking pretty thin. Imagine, then, Day Two: your fourth, fifth and sixth meal. We’d be in a panic. Day three: still no petrol.
What then? With hunger pangs kicking in, and no notion of how long it might take for the supermarkets to restock, how long before those who hadn’t stocked up began stealing from their neighbours? Or looting what they could get their hands on?
There might be 11 million gardeners in Britain, but your delicious summer peas won’t go far when your kids are hungry and the baked beans have run out.
If only these problems had been taken seriously several years ago, when only the “cranks” and “conspiracy nuts” were talking about Peak Oil and the trouble we’ve created along with our society’s cheap oil foundation.
If only.
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If anyone doubts that a shift in the way Americans live is underway, they only have to open up their browser and search, not among the Cassandra-like websites that inhabit the fringes of the net (a region I’m proud to say that WhatComesNext.net lives in, by the way), but the main body of the “respectable” internet.
For instance, searching Google News for “food shortages” leads to a wealth of articles from hundreds of news souces, including Time, US News & World Report, The Telegraph (UK), and on and on. This is a real and fast-developing situation.
The Third World has been battling this issue for a long time, but mainstream America has, for the most part, deemed it a problem “over there” rather than one “right here, right now.” That is changing. Searching Google News for “food shortages in America” leads to a significant package of stories as well.
George Ure’s fine site Urban Survival discusses this again this morning, part of a continuing focus his site’s had recently on food shortages and food riots around the world. Rice shortages at Wal-Mart and Costco are troubling. As Ure notes, even a Wall Street Journal columnist is advising Americans to stock up and store food. It’s one thing when Mormon conservative newsletter publisher Howard Ruff advises stocking up, but another thing entirely when a Wall Street Journal writer suggests it.
Sure, the approaches are different. Sure, the WSJ column is about buying relative ly cheap food today so you don’t have to buy more expensive foodstuffs later and Ruff has been predicting “the coming bad times” since the 70s, evoking imagery that could include violence and some degree of social breakdown
What is especially troubling, is that in the past when writers and analysts who predicted coming economic crashes and severe shortages of important resources, they did so at a time when Peak Oil was coming not here.
And that’s what has changed. The era of cheap oil is over, which means the era of cheap anything is over. It’s time to realize that and take steps to protect yourself and your family.
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As a followup to yesterday’s post about America’s desperate need for a revitalized passenger rail system, comes this article at Bloomberg.com today:
United Air Parent UAL Posts Wider Loss on Fuel Costs.
United became the fourth major carrier to announce this month that it was deepening its plans to cut capacity. Each $1 increase in a barrel of oil raises annual costs by $60 million at United, the world’s second-biggest airline.
This is a serious problem, since fuel prices are nowhere near the top, and these difficulties will continue for a long time.
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Transportation
Now get this: we are sleepwalking into a transportation crisis. As I already said, the airline industry is dying. The price of petroleum-based aviation fuel is killing it. And forget the fantasies about running it on bio-diesel or used french-fry oil. Driving cars will not be an adequate substitute, either. It’s imperative that this country gets serious about restoring the passenger rail system. We can’t not talk about it for another year.
- James Kunstler from his website
Once again, Mr. Kunstler is dead on correct. The airlines are dying, strangling on the reality of post-cheap-oil. Unfortunately, we live in a very large country and are addicted to travel. If you’re in your late 40s (as I am), you may just barely remember a time when air travel was something special, when passengers dressed up and the atmosphere at the airport was a relaxed, comfortable and almost festive one. Flying somewhere was a special event.
Not so anymore, the only place you’ll find shabbier-dressed people in public are at church, if you happen to be (as again, I am) Catholic (but that’s the subject of another post). It’s rush, rush, stand in line for security, rush to put your shoes back on and re-bag your laptop, rush to the gate then stand and wait to board and finally sit and wait to takeoff. It’s seldom a pleasant experience. Why? Because we’re addicted to travel, or more accurately, we’re addicted to cheap and (what we think is) fast transportation.
As Kunstler says in his most recent “Clusterf***k Nation,” date April 21, 2008* (see below), we’re in serious trouble because none of the political candidates are addressing the need for passenger rail service.
I guess my answer to that, is Kunstler’s right everytime he notes that Americans are asleep, and stumbling toward transportation, economic and societal crisis. Our way of life is getting ready to change in a big way, and the end of the cheap petroleum era is the reason.
One way we could protect ourselves, is establishing a crash passenger rail development program, and yes. Normally, I paren a quip after the word “crash,” but in this case, the pun is intended. A crash is coming. A serious, and well-conceived passenger rail development program could dramatically soften the blow to our economy and American life.
* – Unfortunately, Kunstler’s webmaster didn’t design in the ability for Jim to permalink his content, so from here, after next Monday, you’ll have to search a bit to find the article “Blind Spot”, but it’s worth the effort. – ed.
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What humans tend to understand very little about, is the cyclical nature of civilization, and more specifically, society. Apparently, evolution of our species has built into it the assumption that things will either a)stay the same pretty much forever, or failing that, b) improve a little or a lot (depending on just how grand your sense of optimism is).
But that’s sadly, a misreading of how it all works. Everything in our world and universe, for that matter, works through the machine of cycles. It’s built into the source code of our existence, and to deny it, is just self-delusion. We see it and teach it in our educational institutions, study it in our labs and think-tanks and even applaud it in our entertainment (Think The Lion King’s ‘Circle of Life’. But when it comes to life in the U.S. and the Western World, we think it can only get better, bigger and faster, forever and forever.
We are wrong. Read more »
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US
One of the things that always surprises me when we travel to the UK to visit family, is how we use so much more stuff in the U.S. than everywhere else. I first realized this years ago, when I first travelled there. A large portion of my family lives in the U.K. and when we go there, we live, not in hotels, but in our family home. Which means, for the most part, that we live like natives. In the particular town (a village on the West Coast of Scotland, actually) that means we transport our trash and garbage to the dump ourselves. At first, I was amazed at how little of that we generated while living natively.
There are a couple reasons for this. Read more »
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As the economy “implodes in show motions,” as a number of analysts believe is happening, we’re still plagued by the “permabulls” and those who simply believe that it’s always turned around quickly, so it will do the same this time, too.
How naive. One of the design flaws we humans seem stuck with, is a short memory. Sure, we remember bits and pieces from our childhoods, good and bad, and we even remember certain things from almost every phase in our development as adults. What we don’t seem to have, is a very sharp collective memory. I got out of the late 90s Mutual Fund fiasco before it happened, because of an annual report I got from my particular fund. It was essentially a catalog bragging about the smart people they had managing the funds. All I saw were a collection of people who had been going to Jr. High sock hops when the 1987 crash happened. I realized that the people managing my money had no experience in any kind of market, other than one of the bull variety. So I pulled my money, shortly before the wheels came off the market. I moved money to metals (Gold was in the $200 range) and never looked back.
Everywhere today, the evidence of the wheels coming off the bus is present. Whether in complicated matters like the subprime and derivatives disasters-in-the-making, or in simple things like the fact that corporate budgets are demanding zero-expense-growth in the face of significant increases in the cost of doing business (meaning layoffs to hold the budget), the story is clear. We’ve got some economic hurt coming. But yet, there are those who say “it’s always gone up, and it will, this time, too.” Well, the economic tide will rise again, but the questions are these:
1. When? Certainly not in a couple months. Too much voodoo has been used to keep the balloon inflating. It will therefore, take a lot longer to reinflate.
2. Will our economy, nation, even society look the same when it does start back up? No guarantee of that. Make no mistake, the status quo has put us in a serious, serious situation that it won’t survive. The longer the correction is delayed with artifice and voodoo, the more substantive change will be required to start upward again. It may even take a reboot.
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Society
Most peak-oil experts talk about the fact that great changes are coming to our way of life when cheap petroleum products no longer drive our Wal-Mart/Big Box gas guzzling ways. They talk about getting by with less, reverting to older modes of transportation and eating more locally-grown food. But, those suggest a fairly comfortable, if incovenient, more rural lifestyle, so much so, many readers say “good! that’s what we need!”
Paul Eccleston however, presents a much more dangerous possibility, in which food and water are in short supply, and billions face death in the dismantling of our oil-dependent lifestyle.
Richard Heinberg, one of the world’s leading experts on oil reserves, warned that the lives of billions of people were threatened by a food crisis caused by our dependence on dwindling supplies of fossil fuels.
Higher oil prices, the loss of farmland to biofuel crops, climate change and the loss of natural resources would combine with population growth to create an unprecedented food shortage, he claimed.
The only way to avoid a world food crisis was a planned and rapid reduction of fossil fuel use – oil, coal and gas – and a switch to more organic methods in the growing and delivery of food. It would mean a return to living off the land not seen for 150 years.
Unfortunately, a necessary move like this would be, at best, difficult even with everyone pulling the same way. As long as the few who greatly profit from our oil-dependency and the scarcity that’s gathering are convincing when they tell American masses that there’s no real problem, those masses won’t want to make the sacrifices necessary to eventually save ourselves.
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