Can You Survive Life After Cheap Oil? It May Be Time to Find Out
Do you know how to make shoes? Can you build a house? How about grow food? Do you have a doctor and a dentist in your circle of friends?
These are the questions that Andre Angelantoni thinks you should be able to answer in order to plan for the next 10 to 15 years. Angelantoni believes there are radical changes ahead for our society -- and no, it's not the rapture he sees coming, but a post-peak-oil world.
Simply put, peak oil is the point when the world hits the maximum rate of petroleum extraction, and after that, production begins to decline. Since the calculations of geophysicist M. King Hubbert, Ph.D., in 1956, there has been speculation about when (and for some, if) the world will hit its peak production of oil.
Angelantoni is among the crowd of geologists, oil-industry experts and numbers crunchers that believes we are at or near peak, and the way down will be a painful and bumpy ride.
A few years ago, Angelantoni left San Francisco's dot-com (or dot-bomb, as he says) rat race to start a business helping people prepare for life after cheap oil. He offers an online "Uncrash Course" that covers things like how to survive potential disease outbreaks, what career path you should be on and what skills you can offer your community, how you should prepare for an environmental disaster, what do you do about your finances, where should you live, how you will eat and how you will get around.
And he's not alone. Across the country, groups known as "transition towns" are gaining steam, helping their communities become more resilient in the face of a changing energy landscape.
Is Peak Oil for Real?
It would be infinitely more convenient at the moment to dismiss Angelantoni as an end-of-the-world extremist, like the survivalists who have taken to the hills to grow their own food and otherwise live off the land.
Except that there is growing evidence about peak oil and when we may actually hit the top of production (and likewise, what that means for our slide down the decline).
In 2008, Richard Heinberg, a well-known author and educator about peak oil wrote:
Petroleum is a finite substance, and we have reached the inevitable point at which it simply isn't possible to increase the rate at which we extract it from the ground. Most oil-producing countries, including the U.S., have already seen their glory days and are now watching output from their wells gradually dwindle. Only a few nations are early in the production cycle and able to ramp up the rate of flow.
Not everyone shares his certainty. Bill McKibben, the renowned environmental writer and climate-change activist is a little more cautious:
Who knows if we're actually going to see oil production peak sometime soon? Not me. I've read persuasive arguments that we will from writers like Michael Klare and James Howard Kunstler and Paul Roberts. I've also read confident counterarguments from people who've been right in the past, like Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
Oil depletion is not a straightforward physical law, like the fact that the molecular structure of carbon dioxide traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. Instead, it's a detective story that turns on questions like, are the Saudis lying about how fast oil is being depleted in their giant field at Ghawar?
Energy consultant Michael Lynch recently wrote an anti-peak-oil op-ed in the New York Times. He wrote, "Like many Malthusian beliefs, peak-oil theory has been promoted by a motivated group of scientists and laymen who base their conclusions on poor analyses of data and misinterpretations of technical material."
Joseph Romm, who writes for Climate Progress and previously served as a high-ranking member of the U.S Department of Energy during the Clinton years, quickly challenged Lynch's op-ed.
But the most compelling evidence may now be coming -- the U.S government itself. Michael Klare, author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency, wrote in June about the findings of the 2009 report, "International Energy Outlook," from the Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy. The EIA has previously scoffed at peak oil charges. Until now.
For the first time, the well-respected Energy Information Administration appears to be joining with those experts who have long argued that the era of cheap and plentiful oil is drawing to a close. ...
For years now, assorted petroleum geologists and other energy types have been warning that world oil output is approaching a maximum sustainable daily level -- a peak -- and will subsequently go into decline, possibly producing global economic chaos. Whatever the timing of the arrival of peak oil's actual peak, there is growing agreement that we have, at last, made it into peak-oil territory, if not yet to the moment of irreversible decline.
This is groundbreaking coming from the U.S. government, although don't expect President Barack Obama to mention peak oil in any upcoming speeches.
Determining the peak is not so cut and dried, McKibben points out. In addition, tiny market changes, like a period of economic decline where less oil is consumed can mask depleting supplies. But for those who are convinced of the data, they aren't waiting around for the federal government to jump into crisis mode.
Read the rest of this post on AlterNet, including more about what life might look like after peak oil, what "transition towns" are doing to make our energy descent not so bumpy, and how cities like San Francisco are rethinking their strategies.
Follow Tara Lohan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TaraLohan
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Tara, the quote you have from Bill McKibben is from 2005. You may wish to see if his thinking has changed in the four years hence. Bill and Richard Heinberg are both Fellows with Post Carbon Institute (as are 27 others--including David Hughes, a leading Canadian fossil fuel geologist, and David Fridley, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs).
Lynch's op-ed in the NYT was a last gasp attempt to deny what is becoming an increasingly recognized reality--one that even folks like Fatih Birol at the International Energy Agency, never before accused of being a den of peak oil conspiracists, have come to accept.
best,
Asher Miller
Executive Director
Post Carbon Institute
Problem solved!!!
We are heading for peak oil and a maybe ten years away climate tipping point with permafrost methane emissions and ocean acidification forming the leading edge of a very steep slope.. If we are to eliminate GHG’s and prepare for peak oil, we would need to increase our electric capacity by 400% with a thousand new gigawatts of baseload 24/7 green power. That's one nuclear plant a day taking up a couple of acres, 1500 giant windmills in farms occupying 5000 sq miles of land, or 50 sq miles of desert destroyed with solar panels.
Mass produced nuclear power is by far the least expensive green energy available at less than $1000 a kilowatt. As we replace natural gas/oil generation,. we can use electric heat and heat pumps to replace the gas/oil furnace, and a massive nationwide natural gas vehicle conversion (Utah is the example at $1 a gal) to replace oil.
Nuclear waste will be reused as reprocessed fuel in Gen 3.5 nukes, or as fuel in generation four nukes like Sandia's new product. The tiny bit of Gen 4 nuclear waste is no more dangerous than the original uranium.
The nuclear payback would be only a few years paid for by the end of oil imports and the export of America's domestic oil production. An enormous job boosting domestic and export market would be created.
America's example would be copied around the world ending global warming in less than ten years.
i agree with you completely. What I don't understand is why, with today's nuclear safety technology, anyone would stand in the way, but they are. This will also be a great overall stimulus for the economy in jobs. Its a win/win. Where is Obama and our illustrious Congress on this?
How long does the nuclear waste last with our best practical (deployable) nuclear technology?
There is no poison that can compare with nuclear waste when it comes to destroying life.
What you said is green propaganda.
There is no nuclear waste if on-site fuel reprocessing is used and 99.6% of the fuel is used compare to 0.4% in conventional scheme.
Unfortunately Carter prohibited this type of reactors (which exists everywhere else in the modern world) and Clinton killed ALMR project in the early 90s.
We still could be able to buy this technology from Russians or Japanese.
Wow, life after peak oil sounds worse than life after Y2K.
Seriously though, is peak oil a legitimate PRACTICAL concern? As easy-to-reach oil becomes scarce, you claim that it will become more expensive. I agree.
However, the instant that happens, the energy "price umbrella" is raised. It instantly becomes lucrative to pursue alternative energy sources (or, for that matter, seek to extract oil from increasingly more difficult-to-reach deposits). If oil prices skyorcket to $500/barrel, companies can justify higher investments to extract the more difficult-to-reach oil, because it will be worth it. Similarly, alternative energy sources would have a new competitive advantage in price. They will no longer have to compete with cheap oil, which they find impossible to undercut in the present (without massive subsidies, anyway).
I think you underestimate industry's ability to innovate around a problem.
You are take PEAK OIL a lillte too lightly
The problem is that there is significant time between technology innovation and increased production. You will be paying $20/gallon for a long time before innovations will kick in.
Also, don't forget that we subsidized huge Indian and Chinese middle classes to develop along with their economy by using their labor force as a substitute for our own. They are improving their lifestyle and will need more oil to fuel their cars (car sales doubled in China last year nevermind the recession).
with all due respect..., I would not point to Richard Heinberg (an Environmentalist), or James Howard Kunstler as experts on PEAK OIL. They may know allot about the subject but I'd mention experts such as M. King Hubbert (no longer with us), Colin Cambpell, or Kenneth Deffeyes. These people are or were petroleum gelogists -- experts in the field who were actully in the business of looking for oil.
Michael Clair is an expect in how not to dangle a particple, and Yergin is an expert in propganda.
PEAK OIL is real
the only legitmate discussion is timing.
See Anthony Anderson's Profile
I just read John Michael Greer's "The Long Decent" and it was a sobering but optimistic account of what the future holds for our society. We are facing deindustrialization because cheap energy is running out. What we see around us is an anomaly based on the fact that we have been able to exploit the finite fossilized remains of plants and animals from hundreds of millions of years ago.
We are peaking. I honestly think we have peaked. OPEC countries have obviously lied about reserves to keep the illusion going, but Hubbert's Peak has been proven time and time again.
I would recommend planting a food forest, like the one I am doing at Rawmodel.com, and learning how to live with less. The Reagan-Thatcher administrations papered over declining energy supplies, and blew the chance we had to make a really smooth transition. Its up to individuals and local communities to take over now, because the corporate-owned governments that endorses wage slavery obviously have no intent of helping us reach a sustainable society.
Read this book, it may in fact save the lives of you and your family, and at least make them a whole heck of allot more comfortable.
"Proven time and time again"? Is that what you call it when the date keeps getting pushed further and further back?
Perhaps the PEAK OIL and 2012 people can pool their resources for when the sky is falling.
Hi Max,
I believe what the writer was meaning by "Proven time and time again" is the fact that many individual fields, and oil producing countries have peaked- some very notably so.
People forget that the USA was the Saudi Arabia of the first half of the twentieth century producing millions bbls / day for many years.
Indonesia used to be a member of OPEC and is now a net importer of oil. Great Britain is in the same boat with their North Sea oil.
Mexico's production is declining so fast that they may cease to export to us within a year or two, depending on their domestic use.
World Peak will always be illusive as some big producer countries don't share real production figures and we don't know the impact of non-conventional liquids.
Conventional Oil peaked around 2005- it is in the rear view mirror receding into history.
Good Luck.
I strongly recommend reading James Howard Kunstler's novel "World Made by Hand." It illustrates that the US is only one epidemic or resource war or terrorism incident from being thrust back into a 19th century agrarian society. No internet, no reliable electricity, no phones, no computers, no postal service, no faxing or e-mails.
What do you do for antibiotics when you don't have a reliable refrigeration system and no one has the ability to manufacture replacements? How do you make metal when you don't have the energy resources or the foreign ore to make metal because another country outbid us for them? How do you get around when you don't have gas to power cars or foreign rubber to replace bicycle tires? Marijuana and moonshine become painkillers and forms of currency; small towns are forced to become self-sufficient because federal and state government no longer function. People who own landfills and garbage dumps become powerful, because they can scavenge for precious plastic and metal.
One bright side from the novel: deer and fish populations rebound, because humans aren't using high-speed freeways and are no longer polluting rivers.
It's also just a darn good story.
See Anthony Anderson's Profile
Permaculture and Earthship-like architecture is the key. Supplying your body with lots of good bacteria should insure good health.
Look into food forests and alternative healing, and start finding places to salvage metals and plastics. A 5 gallon plastic bucket will be worth it's weight in gold if everything goes to shit.
But all in all, it will be better for us and the planet.
I find the phrase 'transition town' most ironic, because if the end of cheap energy means the end of industrial society, instead of, say, the end of the auto-culture, then the multi-national drug companies I rely upon for my existence are gone. You know any yogurt that produces a feminizing dose of estrogen, Anthony?
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