peaknix

If you have not lived in the deep south (in the USA) then you may not know the charms of kudzu. When you first come across it, you wonder why someone never trims their ivy then you realize its absolutely everywhere and consuming just about anything that is not tended on a regular basis.

Coming from your typical American suburban background where we dedicate our free time to vast tracts of inedible grasses, pouring toxic waste and precious water on this piggish crop to prove our neighborly worth, we might mistake kudzu as a plant that is all about rude infinite unsustainable growth.

Kudzu laughs at us for our blind zeal for order and complete willful ignorance of complex systems.

It is able to grow so fantastically because it doesn’t take from it’s environment so much as enhance it. It is a legume which means it fixes or captures nitrogen from the air (something our industrial mono-agriculture – other than soy beans – doesn’t do). It doesn’t suck the nitrogen from the ground, it gives it back.

It grows roots deep into the soil, bringing up water and minerals from way down, making it available to more surface dwelling organisms.

I could sing the praises of kudzu all day but its the way we DON’T appreciate it that is illustrative of our dysfunctional culture.

We don’t harvest it like the Japanese do, for food like kuzu starch and tofu. We don’t use it as a nitrogen amending cover crop. We don’t seriously develop it for cellulosic ethanol biofuels.

We emulate it’s prodigious growth without caring to understand it’s real nature.

We would, if we had our own misguided monkey brain ways, have a Kudzu Economy.

We built an economy these past 100 years based on infinite growth. We were lazy because, with liquid fossil fuels, the illusion of infinite growth is easily maintained.

Our consensus culture formed our minds to not ask where the power comes from or what to do if it stops. That is dangerous thinking when you are driving the bus on the very edge of a cliff.

No, we sip at the teat of fossil fuel even as it lies supurating in the morgue.

We suck ever harder as we close our eyes to a global economy that has ceased its expansion, inevitably resulting in disastrous immediate contraction.

We want our economy, our individual supremacy, our global domionism to grow on for ever, like kudzu growing greedily across a wasteland of broken down cars, moldering tires, burbling barrels of toxic waste, all the wages of that explosive growth, without ever once paying the dues, without ever once fixing the nitrogen for true and honest growth that requires a willful and respectful understanding of the complexity and limits to a system that may one day be sustainable.

No, I state the obvious when I say that we, as a nation, are snuggling up tight to that corpse in that cold morgue, sipping ever more ferverently.

We are closing our eyes and our ears tightly, living in a matrix-like construct where economic depressions get fixed, gutted banks pass their stress tests, deeper oil deposits are just waiting to be found, and a huge preponderance of hard data showing how we have committed climaticide and have overshot the tipping point quite completely are all utterly wrong.

(This was cross posted to two of my other blogs Nika’s Culinaria and Humble Garden)

Recently, I came across a solar cooking wiki and a whole group of YouTube videos about how Africans are adopting parabolic solar cookers in their villages. The importance of this didn’t really sink in for me until I saw how women walk hours through elephant infested nature preserves to find wood that they poach unsustainably. They get chased by angry elephants (its THEIR home after all) and the women spend ALL DAY finding dwindling resources, leaving behind unattended or poorly attended babies and small children.

In particular, there is the Zambian Mfuwe Solar Cooker Project initiated by Manda Chisanga, a guide in South Luangwa National Park who had won a guiding award and decided to spend his prize money on Solar Cookers.

“The documentary covers the installation of five SunFire14 Parabolic Dishes – the project has been expanded to 15 and we are looking at ways to get 500 Parabolic Dishes into the community to cover 6000 families.” source

With a parabolic solar cooker, all of these risky and ecologically unsustainable practices are stopped immediately. The women can stay with their kids, young girls can go to school instead of watching babies or collecting wood all day themselves.

If that doesn’t sound radical and revolutionary, you are not thinking it through.

You can learn all about the basic principles of solar cooking and see plans for building your own DIY cooker at the Solar Cooking Wiki. Give it a whirl and see what you think.

I have been wanting to make our own DIY solar oven for ages and have finally scraped together some found objects that we have used to make our first winter relevant solar cooker. No cooking is happening yet because I am still testing it and there was no sun to speak of today! We do this in part as a homeschooling project too so the testing is an important part of it.

If you do this, share! Let me hear about how it is going for you.

Found materials and also some high heat enamel spray (which I bought for this project)

Cut to fit insulation on bottom of the oven

Crafting, with duct tape, the interior box

Need to trim height of the box

Trimmed and taped and ready to be sprayed with enamel

Sprayed, dried, inside larger box, found insulation in place

Next step is to make all manner of reflectors to sculpt the photons into the oven

Materials for reflectors

Two reflectors made. I rigged up a tape slide holder on the backs so that the reflectors are placed without taping them onto the oven part.

Slide holder rig

One reflector rigged up

Black covered pot and temperature probes

Solar oven set up inside as we test it out

Made a third reflector and started testing positioning (which isn’t really intuitive, more experiential)

I know I could buy a solar oven but what fun is that?! Not terribly frugal either

Once we get a good sunny day I will test it properly and share back here!

If you read my garden blog – Humble Garden – you would know that I am already planning the 2009 garden. I have already gotten the first batch of seeds and am gearing up to start seedlings soon.

I started gardening seriously as a foodie and a scientist who was worried about the toxic nature of industrial food. I would never claim to be able to grow enough food for this whole family and all the animals we feed, that’s a VERY advanced topic. It is a goal though but it takes planning and I need to find more arable land.

While I do not condone their religious dogmas and practices (not my place, all their own business), I admire the hard work that the Mormon church has done to make it easy for people to store away food for hard times. They have quite a lot of free information on how to determine how much food a certain sized family needs to have on hand for a year and also how to keep it in a safe and effective manner. Visit their site on Family Home Storage to start your journey.

Another resource is Sharon Astyk’s blog posts and classes on food storage at her Casaubon’s Book blog. She is much more comprehensive than the Mormon site and she is more engaging, check it out.

I have started my food storage – though do not take my example 100% gospel, I am sure I am doing all sorts of things less than perfectly!

The photos here show some of what we are doing, storage wise.

Below you can see some of the things I canned last summer. Last spring the tomatoes came in late so I was only able to put up a few 8 or so jars of tomato sauce.

I also had to take down some badly behaved roosters and some past-their-prime broilers so I made a large batch of chicken stock with meat and canned that too. Let me tell you, this broth makes freakishly delicious soups.

In terms of staples that I do not grow and which I can buy in bulk, I figured I need about 100 pounds of dried beans for the year to feed our family in times of poor cash flow and possibly during food scarcities. Below you can see a 50 pound bag of pinto beans and then after I have put it into gallon sized bags.

Beans and rice make complete protein and they store VERY easily. Add a little bit of fat and some homegrown greens such as kale, collards, or lettuces or spinach and you need nothing else.

I am also stocking up on my favorite masa harina to make Colombian empanadas and arepas. I need this for mental health issues!

I have some less than nutritious meat products and mixes that would be REALLLLY easy to make happen should we lose power for long periods of time – better than making french toast!

I use this fabric remnant that I got as a photography background as a way of masking the grocery store look a bit.

This is just a small amount of food storage. I have a lot more rice you do not see here. That bulk rice and other grains will be stored in big plastic light tight tubs in a cool location.

These shelves you see above is right next to a very drafty window (AC unit there) so these foods will be kept cool. I plan on using those canned items soon, otherwise, they would stay in the dark cool pantry you see below.

What I would really love is a set up like you see below built in our basement. The issue with the basement is the fact that we have 5 cats and their litter box is down there.

Please share what you are doing to stock up on food or what you plan to do!

Hubbert saw it all so black and white back in the 1950s. His bell curve was a simple affair, nothing revolutionary, simply a unimodal use diagram of a limited resource.

We had been using oil for something like 50 years by then. We had already poisoned our atmosphere with the vast belchings of bucky balls from burning coal during the Industrial Revolution. We were awash in hydrocarbons for centuries and we certainly didn’t know what the heck we were doing, just blindly going forth in our domination and neglect of our precious earth.

Our science fiction has been mostly about technological dominance or dystopian submission to technology. Star Trek is all about the promise of Post-Carbon Man. You can see what Roddenberry thought we would be like in a powered down dystopia in the movie “First Contact“. Star Trek is the ultimate passive aggressive reaction to a latent fear of peak oil with it’s warp drive, a money-less society, food replicators, and the Prime Directive.

Isaac Asimov was asked, in 1977, by Time Magazine to envision a post-peak oil future. Yeah, thats right – 1977.

Asimov wrote of a distant 1997 in his short piece “The Nightmare Life Without Fuel“, which you can find at this link and which I had included below.

In the end, I do not see this account as all that much of a nightmare. I think that the intended nightmare was that it could have been avoidable. I think peakniks have moved past that now, we are now on to how to survive and thrive. Tell me what you think of this piece.

So it’s 1997, and it’s raining, and you’ll have to walk to work again. The subways are crowded, and any given train breaks down one morning out of five. The buses are gone, and on a day like today the bicycles slosh and slide. Besides, you have only a mile and a half to go, and you have boots, raincoat and rain hat. And it’s not a very cold rain, so why not?

Lucky you have a job in demolition too. It’s steady work.

Slow and dirty, but steady. The fading structures of a decaying city are the great mineral mines and hardware shops of the nation. Break them down and re-use the parts. Coal is too difficult to dig up and transport to give us energy in the amounts we need, nuclear fission is judged to be too dangerous, the technical breakthrough toward nuclear fusion that we hoped for never took place, and solar batteries are too expensive to maintain on the earth’s surface in sufficient quantity.

Anyone older than ten can remember automobiles. They dwindled. At first the price of gasoline climbed—way up. Finally only the well-to-do drove, and that was too clear an indication that they were filthy rich, so any automobile that dared show itself on a city street was overturned and burned. Rationing was introduced to “equalize sacrifice,” but every three months the ration was reduced. The cars just vanished and became part of the metal resource.

There are many advantages, if you want to look for them. Our 1997 newspapers continually point them out. The air is cleaner and there seem to be fewer colds. Against most predictions, the crime rate has dropped. With the police car too expensive (and too easy a target), policemen are back on their beats. More important, the streets are full. Legs are king in the cities of 1997, and people walk everywhere far into the night. Even the parks are full, and there is mutual protection in crowds.

If the weather isn’t too cold, people sit out front. If it is hot, the open air is the only air conditioning they get. And at least the street lights still burn. Indoors, electricity is scarce, and few people can afford to keep lights burning after supper.

As for the winter—well, it is inconvenient to be cold, with most of what furnace fuel is allowed hoarded for the dawn; but sweaters are popular indoor wear and showers are not an everyday luxury. Lukewarm sponge baths will do, and if the air is not always very fragrant in the human vicinity, the automobile fumes are gone.

There is some consolation in the city that it is worse in the suburbs. The suburbs were born with the auto, lived with the auto, and are dying with the auto. One way out for the suburbanites is to form associations that assign turns to the procurement and distribution of food. Pushcarts creak from house to house along the posh suburban roads, and every bad snowstorm is a disaster. It isn’t easy to hoard enough food to last till the roads are open. There is not much in the way of refrigeration except for the snowbanks, and then the dogs must be fought off.

What energy is left cannot be directed into personal comfort. The nation must survive until new energy sources are found, so it is the railroads and subways that are receiving major attention. The railroads must move the coal that is the immediate hope, and the subways can best move the people.

And then, of course, energy must be conserved for agriculture. The great car factories make trucks and farm machinery almost exclusively. We can huddle together when there is a lack of warmth, fan ourselves should there be no cooling breezes, sleep or make love at such times as there is a lack of light—but nothing will for long ameliorate a lack of food. The American population isn’t going up much any more, but the food supply must be kept high even though the prices and difficulty of distribution force each American to eat less. Food is needed for export so that we can pay for some trickle of oil and for other resources.

The rest of the world, of course, is not as lucky as we are.

Some cynics say that it is the knowledge of this that helps keep America from despair. They’re starving out there, because earth’s population has continued to go up. The population on earth is 5.5 billion, and outside the United States and Europe, not more than one in five has enough to eat at any given time.

All the statistics point to a rapidly declining rate of population increase, but that is coming about chiefly through a high infant mortality; the first and most helpless victims of starvation are babies, after their mothers have gone dry. A strong current of American opinion, as reflected in the newspapers (some of which still produce their daily eight pages of bad news), holds that it is just as well. It serves to reduce the population, doesn’t it?

Others point out that it’s more than just starvation. There are those who manage to survive on barely enough to keep the body working, and that proves to be not enough for the brain. It is estimated that there are now nearly 2 billion people in the world who are alive but who are permanently braindamaged by undernutrition, and the number is growing year by year. It has already occurred to some that it would be “realistic” to wipe them out quietly and rid the earth of an encumbering menace. The American newspapers of 1997 do not report that this is actually being done anywhere, but some travelers bring back horror tales.

At least the armies are gone—no one can afford to keep those expensive, energy-gobbling monstrosities. Some soldiers in uniform and with rifles are present in almost every still functioning nation, but only the United States and the Soviet Union can maintain a few tanks, planes and ships—which they dare not move for fear of biting into limited fuel reserves.

Energy continues to decline, and machines must be replaced by human muscle and beasts of burden. People are working longer hours and there is less leisure; but then, with electric lighting restricted, television for only three hours a night, movies three evenings a week, new books few and printed in small editions, what is there to do with leisure? Work, sleep and eating are the great trinity of 1997, and only the first two are guaranteed.

Where will it end? It must end in a return to the days before 1800, to the days before the fossil fuels powered a vast machine industry and technology. It must end in subsistence farming and in a world population reduced by starvation, disease and violence to less than a billion.

And what can we do to prevent all this now?

Now? Almost nothing.

If we had started 20 years ago, that might have been another matter. If we had only started 50 years ago, it would have been easy.

I realized when I was planning last year’s garden just how fantastically hard it is to grow enough in the summer to replace an entire year’s food from the grocery store.

And, even though it is a somewhat frustrating activity while even the day time temps are below 0 F, I find myself planning this year’s garden.

[see photos of how we have built our 1024 square feet of raised beds and grown gardens in 2007 and 2008]

This is a fantastic activity but it also means that I am thinking a lot about food, which is fine because we are not without it. If my job search is not fruitful pretty quickly in the new year we may be exploring the world of food stamps to bridge the real gap between now and when our harvest comes in MANY months from now.

These thoughts could take me in any number of directions but the two come together to prompt me – how much food is enough?

The question of water is very easy – no ambiguities. You need it every day and you need it in one flavor – clean.

Food, well, food is a whole other monster because we humans make it more complex than it all needs to be.

While simply boiled beans and rice can provide complete protein, some people can not even eat it once without having a bad experience the first time eating it (their GI tracts being unused to fiber, a temporary condition that goes away in time) and others cant face eating this simple meal more than a couple of times in a row.

The truth is that we need variety. There is a physiological basis to this. In natural pre-industrial diets, the need for diversity (even seeking out and ritualizing unusual food types) was a means for people to get rare minerals and other nutrients and co-factors.

In a survival situation, pre-industrial people knew how to mete out dwindling resources and how to enhance their food with wild-caught food sources and also how to spice or include “waste” fats (bacon grease for example) to increase the palatability of meager rations.

Not only do we not have these skills any more, we would probably not be very interested in those strategies.

Cynically, I think the only solution for the modern junk-food diet replacement would include a single industrial chemical – MSG (monosodium glutamate). You can sprinkle this on cardboard and people will eat it. Further, our diet is so saturated by MSG that we have become not so much addicted but accustomed to a constant input of this neurotoxin. Obviously, the LESS MSG we eat the better and I think that MSG is used now to mask our food poverty as it is.

I return to my root query though – what is enough and how do we make certain that the “enough” is not boring and that it doesn’t become an agent for depression in of itself.

If you look at what the FDA suggests in terms of caloric need – you will see that there are recommendations based on the basal metabolic rate that is a function of one’s weight and the needs of your body to work properly. If you go below this base caloric need, you will lose weight. If you go above, you will gain. Obviously, not all weight is the same and losing muscle due to a lack of protein in the diet is a very serious matter if you are having to use your body to obtain more food.

If you get those calories from nutrient depleted foods (like most of the meats and vegetables and dairy and eggs we find in our stores today) then you force your body to either pull from it’s own seriously depleted stores of co-factors and other nutritional elements, or the body simply doesn’t perform correctly because all the building blocks simply are not in place and so things like new proteins are not made and toxins are not cleared, etc.

Even though the western world is awash in obesity, we are also starving from malnutrition.

If we find ourselves with little food, provided to us on an emergency basis from central feeding centers in bigger cities (MREs anyone?) – we will be two steps behind because we are already experiencing chronic malnutrition.

If we try to anticipate this by growing and storing our own foods, how do we decide the best diet for adults and children when we have only really known an abundance of calories and food choices?

I would love to hear from you, your thoughts. I am at the beginning of this particular path. As a gardener I know how hard it is to have success growing enough food to eat and store. Its not just a matter of buying a load of different plant types. You have to also grow long storing ones (potatoes, other root crops, squashes, dried corn and meats, canned everything) and also learn how to store them in a way that is good for you.

To close this open ended post (just for now), I will share something I made the other day.

I love many of the products from Bob’s Red Mill and have lots of their flours on hand. One that I had on hand but had not worked with yet is Rye flour. I used the recipe on the bag for rye crackers and also modified it a bit.

My interest in crackers comes from the use of similar though fat-free crackers called Hard Tack in survival situations. We here in the North East see them now on the shelves as oyster crackers or cream crackers.

The wikipedia tells us this about hard tack:

a simple type of cracker or biscuit, made from flour, water, and salt. Inexpensive and long-lasting, it is and was used for sustenance in the absence of perishable foods, commonly during long sea voyages and military campaigns.

Because it is so hard and dry, properly stored and transported hardtack will survive rough handling and endure extremes of temperature.

To soften it, it was often dunked in brine, coffee, or some other liquid or cooked into a skillet meal. Baked hard, it would keep for years as long as it was kept dry. For long voyages, hardtack was baked four times, rather than the more common two, and prepared six months before sailing.

Rye Sesame Crackers (Adapted from this recipe)

INGREDIENTS:

• 1/4 c. White Flour, Unbleached
• 1/4 c. toasted garbanzo bean flour
• 1/2 c. Rye Flour, Dark, Organic
• 1/2 tsp. Sea Salt
• 1 Tb blackstrap molassas
• 2 tsp toasted sesame Seeds (Whole)
• 4 Tb Butter
• 3 Tb Milk
• 1 tsp Baking Powder

Mix together dry ingredients and seeds. Work in butter until fine. Stir in milk. Form into ball and roll out to 1/8 – 1/16 inch between waxed paper. Cut into desired shapes, prick with fork and transfer to ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 400 F for 5-6 minutes until lightly browned on edges. Cool on rack. Store in airtight container.

Craving stability in our living arrangements, our food sources, our political and governing state as well as our personal security is a natural enough thing, truly. As babies, this is something we are instinctually driven to do, find food, find our mother’s voice, her smell, her face, her love.

The problem with this is that any stability, any security, is an illusion.

If you open your eyes to this, then you should take the next step and understand how best to view the state of being that is non-stability – transition.

The Buddhists, being the deep thinkers that they have been these past 2,600 years, have a name for the state of transition – Bardo or antarabhava in Sanskrit.

Just as the Inuit, who live in a world of cold, ice, and snow, have many names for snow and ice, Buddhists – who live in a world of honesty relating to our illusions and how we relate to illusion and “reality” and transition – have broken down transitional states into six different types.

• Shinay bardo (Tibetan) – birth and life
• Milam bardo (T) – the dream state
• Samten bardo (T) – meditation
• Chikkhai bardo (T) – the moment of death
• Chönyid bardo (T) – the luminosity of the true nature which commences after the final ‘inner breath’ (available to those who have practiced meditation)
• Sidpai bardo (T) – becoming or transmigration (time between last breath and first breath in next life)

Roshi Bodhin Kjolhede at the Rochester Zen Center (Philip Kapleau’s lineage and home center) did a fantastic teisho on bardo and our present transition time in his December 8th, 2008 podcast that you can listen to at this link (iTunes).

To me the deeply important lesson we must learn is that surviving and thriving through transition requires us to avoid attachment, attachment that will force our ego to hold onto the old even though it has slipped from it’s grasp.

Once it has passed away, the ego is left with illusion and maintaining that illusion is deeply harmful for the growth of the ego to a less suffering state of being.

We Americans are ALL about attachment – it is how a capitalistic individualistic system works, how it thrives. Just because this is the way we have been aculturated, doesn’t mean that this is the best thing for us. It is exactly the wrong worldview for the hard work ahead as we are all forced to power down in a carbon-reduced world.

Quite the opposite. We have traveled just about as far as we can on this fossil fuel bonanza of orgiastic consumerism and debt dollars. Without these things, our way of life will become an illusion that is no longer possible.

Make no mistake, recognition that our worldview makes us blind to the perils of our age doesn’t mean we will magically escape those perils and not suffer.

I know that I am quite deeply attached to many people and to my homestead. I also know that there are many unperceived or dimly perceived attachments that surround me and my family.

I have stood in my garden on warm sunny days in the midst of the abundance, the fruits of so many months of labor and have tried to imagine doing the same in some post-apocalyptic time where chaos has come to distant cities and relatives. Even if we had some how magically survived those times largely intact, our home wired for solar, water well managed, food in abundance, a local economy that provided us with off-homestead things – would I be able to release everything that defined “America” even though those things were never really something I aspired to? (great wealth, vacations, huge houses, second homes, fantastically expensive educations, high paying stressful jobs, excessive power consumption, etc).

Its a continuum, a process. I would prefer to do this on deep levels as well as in the outer world so that I am not coping with surprise even as I cope with loss. I fear that surprise will always be a part of it, expect it.

Even though it has been a week since the Transition Town conference I went to in Cambridge, MA I am still integrating its message. I will write more, I promise, but I wanted to share something that resonated for me.

At the end of this intense 2 day experience one of our moderators told us this touching story of the Hopi Prophecy. Our moderator said that the Hopi say that the time of the “Lone Wolf” is at an end and that there is this fast rushing river of change that is running through our lives, whether we wish to see it or not.

There are many Hopi and other native prophesies that are floating about, especially relating to end times (tho they thought it as a Transition time from one distinct age to another, very different than modern day strip-mall variety Rapture Lore).

He gave us the nugget but I will share the whole thing here:

“You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour.
Now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour.
And there are things to be considered:
Where are you living? What are you doing?
What are your relationships? Are you in right relation?
Where is your water? Know your garden.
It is time to speak your Truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for the leader.
This could be a good time!
There is a river flowing now very fast.
It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid.
They will try to hold on to the shore.
They will feel they are being torn apart, and they will suffer greatly.
Know the river has its destination.
The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of
the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.
See who is in there with you and celebrate.
At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally.
Least of all, ourselves.
For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a
halt. The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves!
Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary.
All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

–The Elders, Oraibi, Arizona Hopi Nation

Whenever I get weighed down by a deadline (or two) it is hard to break through the writing resistance. Since I am back in the blogging saddle these past couple of days, I have made a couple of posts in my other blogs but have yet to do so here.

On our own food security:

• A Snippet of my Edible Summer
• A Fall Fowl Phalanx

On the global food security tragedy of Melamine:

• Melamine, oh thy name is legion

There is also the whole massive ball of uncertainty that clouds the current economic environment along with the dangerous volatility in oil and gas prices.

I personally dislike the mental mania that leads to the massive lows we had the last couple of weeks and the high we got yesterday close to 900 up on the DOW. I guess I just do not have enough testosterone to enjoy such silly swings, my estrogen and progesterone say – shoot for steady state homeostasis that doesn’t lead to hyperbolic crashes every day. Is this too much to ask? Yes, indeed, I think it is.

The sludgy miasma of conflicting indicators that surrounds us makes peak oil aware people even more edgy because the cognitive dissonance between the slump in crude prices, the drop in gas prices, and our empty bank accounts and bleeding treasuries seem to tell us that these indicators either are irrelevant or confounded in painfully complicated ways.

I think that the psychology and dynamics of oil price, use, demand, supply and futures are profoundly non-intuitive to begin with and then it’s been toxified by the inrush of derivative loving speculators who are trying to catch an up or downdraft to re-coup losses elsewhere.

Thing is, we seem to have been on a steady downturn in crude prices that has a downward price support for a few weeks. It means I can drive to work on less expensive gas but it has a very huge negative impact on peak oil.

The demand destruction that followed our price shock this summer lead to real changes in American gas usage, this WILL reverse as the price goes down.

With this fall in prices and the collapse of credit markets, exploration of new resources is truly dying on the vine (they were rather feeble in some ways to begin with).

On top of this, current reserves are starting to prove out to be less than promised.

Carola Hoyos and Javier Blas in The Financial Times (London, October 28 2008), in an article called “World Will Struggle To Meet Oil Demand” report that the International Energy Agency’s annual report, the World Energy Outlook

Output from the world’s oilfields is declining faster than previously thought
…
“The future rate of decline in output from producing oilfields as they mature is the single most important determinant of the amount of new capacity that will need to be built globally to meet demand,” the IEA says.

The watchdog warned that the world needed to make a “significant increase in future investments just to maintain the current level of production”.

Oil Price Shock 2.0

There are some, even in the face of the current downward trend in crude prices, that are suggesting that the rebound, when the price support for bottom is felt, will be severe.

Guy Chazan writing for the Wall Street Journal in an article called “Oil-Price Rebound Could Be Severe” published today (Oct 29, 2008), suggests:

The slump in oil prices has spread relief among consumers and fuel-reliant industries, but also is squeezing the companies who could invest in new sources of oil — spurring concerns that prices will prompt them to shelve investments.

and

“Low oil prices are very dangerous for the world economy,” said Mohamed Bin Dhaen Al Hamli, the United Arab Emirates’ energy minister, speaking Tuesday at an oil-industry conference in London. “We need an adequate and reasonable oil price that will continue to stimulate investment.” With prices now languishing, he said, “a lot of projects that are in the pipeline are going to be reassessed.”

Rationale is:

Nobuo Tanaka, head of the International Energy Agency, the Paris-based watchdog, was one of several experts at the annual Oil and Money conference here predicting that the industry could be setting the stage for yet another supply-and-demand whiplash down the road. “We’re concerned that supply won’t catch up with demand after this crisis,” Mr. Tanaka said. “The supply crunch may come again, but in a more acute way.”

Big Sighs

Yeah, its all non-intuitive, not even counter-intuitive. Demand destruction is a complex phenomenon and hard to predict in terms of when it might ease and then signal the upward spike that the oil producers will ensure as soon as the supply – demand spread narrows. They are dropping their output now and will certainly not be in the mood to throttle back up next time we consumer nations bleat about unfair pricing.

Each price shock conditions the entire market. Each player learns a certain lesson. I think it would take a team of neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, psychics, and informatics statisticians to be able to model the various scenarios as we proceed through the descending collapse levels.

I found it difficult to drive home on my commute yesterday, was crying freakish cognitive dissonance tears, nauseating trills of fear mixed with free floating anxieties from work (am simply submerged with deadlines) and the market dive at the end of the day. Also, am feeling involuntary shockwaves of similar emotions since I learned that my mother’s entire nest egg which my dad worked himself to the bone to provide before he died – its now down to $0.00 because of the market.

I was crying while driving because I was listening to Romanian poet and editor of the Exquisite Corpse Andrei Codrescu’s tremendous Post Carbon Screed on NPR called “After The Bailout“. (that link will take you to the text and a button to listen to it in Prof. Codrescu’s wonderful accented reading)

In it he says things like:

I was sharpening my chain saw when they called me from Washington, D.C., to ask me how to fix the economy.

This request focused my thoughts, or the lack of ‘em, to such a fine point, I gave my 14-inch Echo an edge it never had. Good enough for cutting half a cord at least, to keep the wood stove going through October. I love not paying the oil company a nickel. Except for the half-gallon of gas and the chain oil, but I’m fixin’ to make the thing run on plum brandy. I’ve got a plum tree.

Ah, where were we? The economy, yes: $700 billion is more than enough money to buy every able-bodied American a chain saw, a solar-powered generator and a stake in a communal well and windmill. Also, red dirt and plum trees. That would probably only cost about $100 billion, and you can use the other $600 billion to buy everybody their house outright.

Now everybody can own their house and be green and self-sufficient, and can go back to whatever they were doing before the world ended: watching TV. Except for me. I was sharpening my chain saw.

Then it got more brutal.

Such self-sufficiency made the economy grind to a halt, so the government had to do something again: They called in the Army to chase everyone out of their self-contained greenhouses.

And now they are coming up the road to my place because I’m a poet, and I live in a compound defended by polygamist haikus.

“What did you do wrong?” I asked the first of the refugees to get over the palisades.

“Nothing,” he said. “We just got out of debt and stopped watching TV! So the urge to buy things on credit disappeared. So they sent in the troops. First thing they did was to put a 40-inch plasma TV in every room and fixed it just so we couldn’t turn it off. Just like in Orwell, only with much sharper images. They are calling this the Second Bailout, or the Bail Back In.”

Go read the whole thing!

This man is simply fantastic, he never fails to jolt me from my spot. He is my nihilist muse, perhaps I was Romanian in some prior reality.

I tend to ruminate on peak oil most on the weekends (don’t we all – too busy holding on to the edge the rest of the week). I usually check on my YouTube subscriptions on Sunday in the morning and that usually means checking to see what has been posted by Peak Moment (PeakMoment on YouTube. This week is an interview of Molly Brown (of Alliance for a Post Petroleum Local Economy – APPLE Shasta) by Janaia Donaldson.

Molly describes nicely the reaction of one real person to learning about Peak Oil and then stepping up to impact her world.

We are so numb in our odd little multi-media cocoons as we learn about peak oil and societal collapse in the abstract – we read mass media opinion leaders like Kunstler and we read the PO blogs and we imagine that there is some specific way it will “go down” and that there will be some best-fit response or some most likely outcome in terms of how it will effect our lives.

We do not realize that the very multimedia lives that we live and use to learn about these meta-phenomena themselves is part of our peak world – it will fall away and we will be left with what we only really have, our immediate environment. It wont matter what Kunstler opined -our own collapse realities will be our own and it will reflect our own world view and how that informs our reaction to collapse.

So, for some, it means hiding from the zombies – and they will. For others, it means being the zombie, and they will. For yet others, it will be about dominating others to harness resources – and they will. And yet others, it will be about choosing the positive outlook. Not because they are simple/uninformed or because that is the 100% “correct” choice nor because they are naive and can not conceive of the evil way – no. I think they (and I think I am one of those) will choose a positive world outlook (eg., the Holmgren green life boat) because we understand how we choose our world every moment of the day and that we choose to strive for and live in harmony.

Transition will be individualized – it cant be otherwise.

To be able to survive and thrive in the descent, a person, family, community, and society needs to have persistent resilience. Thats not about effective gardening so much as being able to build a mindset that keep you interested in getting up in the morning day after day, year after year, and doing the hard work of subsistence living.

It wont be like pioneering days because we will not becoming from some developed context to conquer a new land with open possibilities. We will be dealing with the massive negative impact of loosing those open possibilities – that paradise lost. Our cultural psyche is not about just getting buy, its about dominance and time’s arrow pointing toward our American Dominance in some rosy future.

With the energy descent – that simply will not exist. People who can not let that particular fantasy go, along with its well understood success metrics will not be able to summon and sustain the resilience to make it through the transition.