The Agenda Restated

February 5, 2007
      Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for being "Mister Gloom'n'doom," or for "not offering any solutions." I find this bizarre because I never fail to present audiences with a long, explicit task list of projects that American society needs to take up in the face of the combined problems I have labeled The Long Emergency. That the audience never hears this, and then indignantly demands such instruction, only reinforces my sense that the cognitive dissonance in our culture has gone totally off the charts.

     Insofar as I just returned from a college lecture road trip, and heard the same carping all over again, I conclude that it's necessary for me to spell it all out a'fresh. I think of this not so much as a roster of "solutions" but as a set of reasonable responses to a new set of circumstances. (Not everything we try to do will succeed, that is, be a "solution.") So, for those of you who are tired of wringing your hands, who would like to do something useful, or focus your attention in a purposeful way, here it is.

• Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by means other than gasoline. This obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs could really prove fatal. It is especially unhelpful that so many self-proclaimed "greens" and political "progressives" are hung up on this monomaniacal theme. Get this: the cars are not part of the solution (whether they run on fossil fuels, vodka, used frymax™ oil, or cow shit). They are at the heart of the problem. And trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring system by shifting it from gasoline to other fuels will only make things much worse. The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car. We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.

• We have to produce food differently. The ADM / Monsanto / Cargill model of industrial agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix this. Farming will soon return much closer to the center of American economic life. It will necessarily have to be done more locally, at a smaller-and-finer scale, and will require more human labor. The value-added activities associated with farming -- e.g. making products like cheese, wine, oils -- will also have to be done much more locally. This situation presents excellent business and vocational opportunities for America's young people (if they can unplug their Ipods long enough to pay attention.) It also presents huge problems in land-use reform. Not to mention the fact that the knowledge and skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly retrieved from the dumpster of history. Get busy.
• We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in our nation organized for car dependency is going to fail to some degree. Quite a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami....) will support only a fraction of their current populations. We'll have to return to traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities (along with a productive rural landscape). Our small towns are waiting to be reinhabited. Our cities will have to contract. The cities that are composed proportionately more of suburban fabric (e.g. Atlanta, Houston) will pose especially tough problems. Most of that stuff will not be fixed. The loss of monetary value in suburban property will have far-reaching ramifications. The stuff we build in the decades ahead will have to be made of regional materials found in nature -- as opposed to modular, snap-together, manufactured components -- at a more modest scale. This whole process will entail enormous demographic shifts and is liable to be turbulent. Like farming, it will require the retrieval of skill-sets and methodologies that have been forsaken. The graduate schools of architecture are still tragically preoccupied with teaching Narcissism. The faculties will have to be overthrown. Our attitudes about land-use will have to change dramatically. The building codes and zoning laws will eventually be abandoned and will have to be replaced with vernacular wisdom. Get busy.
• We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of Happy Motoring (including the entire US trucking system). Get used to it. Don't waste your society's remaining resources trying to prop up car-and-truck dependency. Moving things and people by water and rail is vastly more energy-efficient. Need something to do? Get involved in restoring public transit. Let's start with railroads, and let's make sure we electrify them so they will run on things other than fossil fuel or, if we have to run them partly on coal-fired power plants, at least scrub the emissions and sequester the CO2 at as few source-points as possible. We also have to prepare our society for moving people and things much more by water. This implies the rebuilding of infrastructure for our harbors, and also for our inland river and canal systems -- including the towns associated with them. The great harbor towns, like Baltimore, Boston, and New York, can no longer devote their waterfronts to condo sites and bikeways. We actually have to put the piers and warehouses back in place (not to mention the sleazy accommodations for sailors). Right now, programs are underway to restore maritime shipping based on wind -- yes, sailing ships. It's for real. Lots to do here. Put down your Ipod and get busy.
• We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies-of-scale (and kill local economies) -- they are going down. WalMart and the other outfits will not survive the coming era of expensive, scarcer oil. They will not be able to run the "warehouses-on-wheels" of 18-wheel tractor-trailers incessantly circulating along the interstate highways. Their 12,000-mile supply lines to the Asian slave-factories are also endangered as the US and China contest for Middle East and African oil. The local networks of commercial interdependency which these chain stores systematically destroyed (with the public's acquiescence) will have to be rebuilt brick-by-brick and inventory-by-inventory. This will require rich, fine-grained, multi-layered networks of people who make, distribute, and sell stuff (including the much-maligned "middlemen"). Don't be fooled into thinking that the Internet will replace local retail economies. Internet shopping is totally dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no longer be cheap. It also is predicated on electric power systems that are completely reliable. That is something we are unlikely to enjoy in the years ahead. Do you have a penchant for retail trade and don't want to work for a big predatory corporation? There's lots to do here in the realm of small, local business. Quit carping and get busy.
• We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going to make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things. The curtain is coming down on the endless blue-light-special shopping frenzy that has occupied the forefront of daily life in America for decades. But we will still need household goods and things to wear. As a practical matter, we are not going to re-live the 20th century. The factories from America's heyday of manufacturing (1900 - 1970) were all designed for massive inputs of fossil fuel, and many of them have already been demolished. We're going to have to make things on a smaller scale by other means. Perhaps we will have to use more water power. The truth is, we don't know yet how we're going to make anything. This is something that the younger generations can put their minds and muscles into.
• The age of canned entertainment is coming to and end. It was fun for a while. We liked "Citizen Kane" and the Beatles. But we're going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players and playwrights and scenery-makers, and singers. We'll need theater managers and stage-hands. The Internet is not going to save canned entertainment. The Internet will not work so well if the electricity is on the fritz half the time (or more).
• We'll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive the coming decades. The huge investments we have made in these facilities will impede the transition out of them, but they will fail anyway. Since we will be a less-affluent society, we probably won't be able to replace these centralized facilities with smaller and more equitably distributed schools, at least not right away. Personally, I believe that the next incarnation of education will grow out of the home schooling movement, as home schooling efforts aggregate locally into units of more than one family. God knows what happens beyond secondary ed. The big universities, both public and private, may not be salvageable. And the activity of higher ed itself may engender huge resentment by those foreclosed from it. But anyone who learns to do long division and write a coherent paragraph will be at a great advantage -- and, in any case, will probably out-perform today's average college graduate. One thing for sure: teaching children is not liable to become an obsolete line-of-work, as compared to public relations and sports marketing. Lots to do here, and lots to think about. Get busy, future teachers of America.
• We have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of intertwined rackets based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will not survive the discontinuities to come. We will probably have to return to a model of service much closer to what used to be called "doctoring." Medical training may also have to change as the big universities run into trouble functioning. Doctors of the 21st century will certainly drive fewer German cars, and there will be fewer opportunities in the cosmetic surgery field. Let's hope that we don't slide so far back that we forget the germ theory of disease, or the need to wash our hands, or the fundamentals of pharmaceutical science. Lots to do here for the unsqueamish.
• Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled. You can state categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely to fail -- everything from the federal government to big corporations to huge institutions. If you can find a way to do something practical and useful on a smaller scale than it is currently being done, you are likely to have food in your cupboard and people who esteem you. An entire social infrastructure of voluntary associations, co-opted by the narcotic of television, needs to be reconstructed. Local institutions for care of the helpless will have to be organized. Local politics will be much more meaningful as state governments and federal agencies slide into complete impotence. Lots of jobs here for local heroes.

      So, that's the task list for now. Forgive me if I left things out. But please don't carp at me, by letter or in person, that I am not providing you with anything to think about or devote your personal energy to. If you're depressed, change your focus. Quit wishing and start doing. The best way to feel hopeful about the future is to get off your ass and demonstrate to yourself that you are a capable, competent individual resolutely able to face new circumstances.

Comments

[Steve Johnson]

Bravo Jim...

This is what people need to think about to prepare themselves for what's to come...

[Matt Savinar]

Dr. Doom,

Boy did you ever hit the nail on the head with this:

"You are aware of the degree of disappointment of those in the higher education arena once they will be told to downsize or pack it in."

I won't even talk about these matters to old friends from law school. They've got way too much invested (plus $100,000 of debt) to even begin to process this stuff sans a mental breakdown.

It is very grim situation, and one that I think most of the Peak Oil crowd who are aging Baby Boomers and "million dollar hippies" (you know the type) seem to conveniently forget about.

There are going to be a lot of formerly upper middle class young people, particularly men, who will be explosively pissed off as this all comes out in the wash.

[Don Hargraves]

Amen, Brother. I've had a hatred of the car since I first made it to College and realized that I could do everything without depending on some bucket of bolts with four wheels and a tank that needed constant feeding. That I make a living off these things (as cab driver, now paratransit driver) is an irony I've been able to justify simply because of necessity (and because 20 rides a day means 20 cars not being used).

Of course, the University system depends on massive inputs and outputs. Forty thousand students per campus makes for a massive need for food, housing, workers of various technical and knowledge-based stripes, transport (even if much of it is walking), upkeep and a constant drive to attract the forty-thousand students that the econsystem known as a University needs every four-seven years to survive. That forty thousand students must come from the county, state, nation and world (more and more the world as the nation more and more decides that the universities are unnecessary and thus must survive by their own efforts), and that includes the one-year and two-year failures who feed the college system without gaining any ability to draw the benefits (at least I got a degree from two of the three institutions I attended). Indeed, the college system of the United States has become a racket set up to take money from its students with promises of a prosperous future that it hasn't been able to give for the past forty years.

Knowledge will have to be localized, as it will have to be held within the head (and shared to a great degree with our co-habitants) or in books that everyone has because they're important enough for everyone to have. That's why we still fight over versions of the bible but much of the pulp fiction that was made before now can only be found in libraries in a state of repair that can only be called desperate.

Much of what's taught in College would be worse than useless in a society where traveling is full of travails (And yes, the two words share the same root. Travail is closer to the meaning of the root.).

However, I would see a world where the knowledge is great and everyone is smarter. The difference being that everyone is smarter because they know what's needed to survive, not what amuses them.

[Matt Savinar]

Jim,

I tried my hand on the third-tier ring of the PEak Oil speaking circuit. I was consistently surprised at how people reacted to this set of facts until I realized that people show up to these talks expecting to have their asses kissed and told they are "the good guys", more or less. On a subtle level this is what Al Gore has turned into a new career for himself. A bunch of law students cheered wildly for him, apparently not realizing that if what he is saying is true half of them will end up without jobs. What they came to the talk is to feel self-righteous, at least typically.

So when you show up and bitchslap them with the truth they get upset. Because they came with the expectation they would be leaving the talk feeling mighty-good 'bout themselves, NOT wondering what the hell they're going to do for a living as these catastrophes unfold.

[kd]

You may be right, Ross; I certainly don't know enough to disagree with either of you. I met McKibben several years ago -- an intelligent & unpretentious man. I liked him a lot. He spent some time in Kerala, India, where I lived for many years, & wrote about his impressions.

*

The streets of Austin have been nearly deserted tonight because of the football game. I wonder if it's that way all over America.

[kd]

Well put, Don.

[Dr.Doom]

Matt,

A lot of my colleagues are in deep denial. We give PO seminars and courses that are usually well attended and there are lots of questions. If I bring the topic up in any other context (except in private) I'm told it's not appropriate. Well, it's never going to be a rosy topic, and sure, everyone loves the optimist, but some hard-nosed realism had better begin to get discussed, and soon. My suspicion is PO and life afterwards will begin to be a mainstream discussion topic in just a few more years. It ought to be a national topic for the 2008 elections, and I hope it will be.

Meanwhile, my kudos to you and to JHK and the other CFNers for "telling it like it is".

[Karin Sympathy]

kd's observation told us more about 'what the future holds' for most people.

kunstler is still not addressing the key to sustaining life on earth. who is going to do what he's suggesting? how has american life EVER been conducive to self-sufficiency? our history shows it takes tremendous amounts of SACRIFICE, capital and cooperation to provide for the 'daily lives' of millions of american people now and into the future. even the good-hearted people on this board will find it very difficult to pick up everything and move in order to live kunstler's way.

i recently checked out a book about the development of land in southern Texas. it took almost 200 years after the first settlements for Galveston to become a viable deep sea port.
it took the expertise and loyalty of hundreds of people from varying backgrounds. still, they ran into things they could not foresee.
the famous King ranch has other sites of operation in the north in case of SEVERE DROUGHT. they've planted their seeds in Cuba, Brazil and Australia. it's a network based on work that was started 200 years ago, people. it's too late to start your 'new civilizations' NOW.

the emergency is that we are out of time. the tape recorder is about to self destruct whether we choose the mission or not. there is no mission. you will not be able to save yourself or anyone else in the context in which kunstler writes.

that's why people seek shelter in church...they know only God can solve the problems presented in daily life.

[Matt Savinar]

Dr. Doom,

What do you teach? Are you, like moi, a professonal prophet of doom?

And if so, do you care to duel here on Jim's board?

[Laura Louzader]

I have in mind soap and other toiletries,and then cosmetics. The only thing is, can I produce this stuff, to start, in my own kitchen and then in a moderate storefront, profitably?

The soap is easy, the idea being to produce enough at once that I could sell it for $1 a bar, comparable to the brands such Dove and Carress now, only a rather better soap.

The other stuff is more difficult, but it lends itself to small scale production. There is a wonderful little company in Farmington Hills, MI, that I have bought products from before, high quality and modestly priced. I turned to them when one major maker stopped carrying a line of makeup I liked.

The thing is to use very known ingredients that have already been tested. I once knew a man here in Chicago whose family-owned business, very small, supplied generic cosmetic ingrediants to Sally Beauty Supply, among others.

The soap takes minimal startup capital. The cosmetics take much more. The aim would be to build one upon the other.

With more capital, I would build good solid sofas, in classic styles, to replace all the junk from Jennifer and Ikea that is super-trendy but low-quality. This stuff sells well now because it is cheap and who cares about quality when it will be out of style in 3 years anyway? I believe that we will go back to buying furniture as we did in the 40s and 50s- good, classicly styled stuff built to be kept for 30 years. Right now you cannot do this and hope to make a living because the Ikeas and Jennifers can undercut you, and the throwaway mentality makes people uninterested in real quality. But when shipping charges go out the roof and you must buy stuff to keep and use forever, local furniture makers will come back.

We have many local dress designers here in Chicago who have a hard time, but in a time when things become very local from necessity, these people will be able to do well. They make beautiful clothes by hand that cannot compete with the international designers because they cannot hook into the fashion networks, but that will change when things become localized again.

I think of all the great things that used to be made here, hundreds of different items, that are now imported. Cutlery, cookware, home building kits, tools, steel, railcars, train engines, and of course candy. That is a very short, abbreviated list that gives no idea of how complex and finegrained city economies used to be in the US before the defense spending made all the major cities in to one-horse towns dependent upon defense spending and auto products. The defense contracts that went to the auto makers rendered them spoiled and fat and incapable of competing in a market economy, which is why the Japanese stomped them in the 70s forward. Could these automakers revert to building railcars? I doubt if it even occurs to them.Sugar subsidies murdered the candy industry here. The rest died of cheap imports.

Now is there someone out there with big bucks who will start another passenger railroad?

[Dr.Doom]

Matt,

I teach marine geology and mineral resources. My specialities are in geochemistry, volcanology, paleoclimate, hazards and mineral resources. I read a lot of PO books, papers and posts, and I give seminars on the topic of PO because I think it's extremely important. I've known about PO since 1970, when I took an undergraduate course that had "Resources and Man" (National Research Council, 1970) as a text. In that book, the last chapter is on petroleum resources by M. King Hubbert. It is a seminal work, and about three years ago I stumbled upon it in an old file while preparing for a class and it hit me like a rock to the head. There are many great figures in the paper, but the one that really got me was a timeline plot of fossil fuel energy production over a -5000 year to +5000 year period with the year 2000 as approximate zero point. It's a sharp blip! Hubbert had concluded by then that our civilization's only long-term hope was further development of nuclear energy.

So, if you wanna duel, sure, but I must warn you that I have a very dark streak that I've inherited from my father, a very wise but not particularily optimistic person when it came to the human predicament.

[NZ peaker]

Excellent post Jim! The catch with trying to do somthing right now business wise (as Laura alludes to) is that until the Walmarts of this world actually do collapse, we are left waiting in the wings. Once the vacuum opens up I'm sure it will be filled quickly, if like you say we can remember how. Meanwhile here in New Zealand we are so blindly following the US in our suburban sprawl patterns that it is left to the fitness freaks to sing the praises of older settlements - apparently living in a mixed use, high density, walkable town is better for your health. Pity so much of our development is beyond conversion. This is so goin' to be about survival of the fittest!

[Ronnie Horesh]

I can't fault Jim's analysis, and I for one prefer living in a real city than the suburbs. The changes he foresees I think are likely to happen, but I think they can happen incrementally. Most likely, any catastrophe will be experienced by the poor countries, who cannot adjust to higher oil prices.

[Bill]

Mr Kunstler's excellent blog suggests it's 'Back To The Future' perhaps he has in mind something like this - a snippet from something I wrote for my old school.

"The Way It Was" (1940's-'50's)

"When, thinking of where to start story, my mind harked back to a fairly recent conversation I had with acquaintance of mine, he is a tad older than me and we were discussing the changes our generation had seen over the years, he went on to tell me about the times when his mother used to send him to do the weekly shopping during the war. He was then in his teens and owned a racing bike, which he would ride to the next village to collect the shopping, on the return journey, two carrier bags hung from the handlebars as he cycled home.

Today, we drive several miles out of town to our favourite supermarket in our off road 4x4’s, we return with the boot (trunk) of the car stuffed with food for just one week, plus a full tank of petrol for good measure, some contrast with the youth on his bike and two carrier bags.

At least a decade before the import of American style supermarkets, food shopping was altogether a different experience, unlike to-days once a week visit to the supermarket, in those days, shopping was done on a daily basis at your local shop. Such a shop would be in your own street, road or village, or perhaps it would be a corner shop in a town street, it was in such a shop that I used to go on errands for my mother, it was a meeting place where news and gossip was exchanged, it was a community centre, to an observant person it was a place where the mood of the nation could be gauged. These shops performed a vital role by stocking the basic needs for life’s existence.

For several years after the war, rationing was still in force, every man woman and child was issued with a ration book, which consisted of pages of stamp like coupons, which would be cut out by the shop owner to the coupon value of the goods purchased. This was something I was familiar with from the time I could first remember, of course had no idea at the time what it was all about. To my recollection, sweets, chocolate and biscuits were very scarce. With hindsight, by to-days standards, the rations allocated to a family of four seem barely sufficient for one person.

In addition to the local shop would be the door to door deliveries of milk, and bread, in the earlier days, I can remember the milk being delivered by horse and cart, the milk would be contained in a churn and it came straight from the farm, the milk would be ladled out and poured into a jug which you, yourself would provide. Quite often we would have a ride in the cart.

Shopping for other than foodstuffs, which would be mostly for clothing and footwear, a visit to town would be required; it would be by bus that you would travel. There was neither heated mall, nor pedestrian-only streets and as mentioned, very few privately owned cars, above all, the number of people in town would be barely a fraction of what you see today, especially during weekdays.

All shopping was done in purpose built shops lining each side of the busy streets, these would vary from multiple stores to small locally owned premises, some staffed by the owners themselves.

The practice of self-service was unheard of and business was conducted over a counter in a congenial and respectful manner, all goods were paid for in cash (or more rarely by cheque,) the age of the credit card was a world away, there was no wandering about the premises with goods in hand looking for someone to take your money. These were the days before the corporate image, before bar codes and before the ‘one size fits all’ retail warehouse, there was no checkout-queue to join as there was no checkout, for this was a time when shopping was carried out in a time honoured genteel way. Of course, the range of choice of goods on sale was but a mere fraction compared with today.

The only financial houses were the solid respectable banks, no cash dispensers, no cash-back, no building societies, no estate agents, no DIY stores, no flash pubs and certainly no fast food outlets, other than the traditional fish and chip shop."....

Is this story is coming to a town near you?

[German Mike]

Nice post Jim. We will eventually do all these things after we tried everything else...
Bush is asking for hundereds of billions more for the military. The democratic wussies are afraid to deny funding because it could be interpreted by the voter as a lack of support for Halliburton.
With Republicnas AND Democrats in power it would be nice if we would finally have an opposition party in this fine democracy of ours.

[Matthew Cornell]

Thanks for the great article, Jim.

[David Mathews]

Hello Jim,

> "We also have to prepare our society for moving people and things much more by water. This implies the rebuilding of infrastructure for our harbors, and also for our inland river and canal systems -- including the towns associated with them. The great harbor towns, like Baltimore, Boston, and New York, can no longer devote their waterfronts to condo sites and bikeways. We actually have to put the piers and warehouses back in place (not to mention the sleazy accommodations for sailors)."

This is one of those ideas which appear very good but is beset with a fatal flaw: Building port facilities in an era of perpetually rising sea levels is a fools' errand. These port facilities will succumb to the ocean waves and the cycle will repeat until the world has exhausted its resources and become bankrupt.

If the oceans rise 3 feet by 2100 what sort of impact will that have upon all of the world's ports and the millions of people who live near sea level?

If the oceans continue to rise for the next thousand years what is the point of building and rebuilding port facilities? The costs will soon become prohibitive and the shipping industry will go extinct.

This fate is certain especially when considered within the context of Peak Oil. While we do not know how much oil the world will produce in five years, we can be absolutely certain that all of the fossil fuel energy resources will become depleted with the next five centuries.

The future doesn't look pretty. The future looks positively bleak. Working very hard is worse than doing nothing at all.

[waitingforthealiens]

A truly moronic post today. It reminds me of the commune scenes in Easy Rider. Yeah, man, their gonna make it, man.

Please retire to your mud hut and dine on dandelion salad and the freshest of goat curds.

[george]

here's the perfect epitaph for our happy-motoring utopia when we finally run out of oil: "He who troubles his own house will inherit wind, And the foolish will be servant to the wisehearted."

[ryan costa]

It is ok to build ports, so long as they aren't built on large river deltas.

There is no need to move into mud-hut communes and eat dandelion greens salads.

Waitingforaliens represents the Mindless-Status-quo Americans, the ones who giddily embrace one extreme and can only imagine one other extreme.

[Paul Cooley]

I feel hopeful because of the people around me. Largely because most of our friends were doing it, we now have several bee hives, chickens, and two dwarf dairy goats, (though they are young and have not yet gone through the process of pregnancy and lactation. I have no idea how to milk goats, but I guess I will soon, and both my children will). It seems that you can't really be with it in Santa Fe, NM without owning a few chickens. Our friends make some of the best goat cheese I've ever tasted. Our neighbors down the street keep us supplied with produce in the summer, and we pass off some of our honey to them. I think these networks of local agriculture are there, waiting to be tapped into. I guess it helps that our neighborhood's covenants -- we live in a suburb -- explicitly allows "normal" livestock as long as it isn't for commercial purposes. I think even that stipulation would be overlooked for small scale sales, as long as you're not keeping three hundred chickens.

We ditched our car three years ago. I find that the main way to reduce our culture's dependance on the automobile is to sell your own. If everyone sold their car, there would not be that nasty aspect of automobile dependence in this country. I'm also working with the city to make improvements for bicyclists. The democratic process works surprisingly well at the local level. My two children -- five and seven years old --ride with me on a triple bicycle. We have studded snow tires for the ice. They love to bike up into the mountains to camp. My youngest keeps saying, "I wish they would get rid of all the cars in the world." Bicycling is all remembers.

And when we travel to visit relatives, we take Amtrak. It's not the best train service in the world, but it does the job.

I have not done any of these things explicitly to prepare for the Long Emergency, but they give me hope that if a Long Emergency is waiting in the wings, that we have the social capital, and the local agricultural knowledge to do very well.

The rest of the nation can't be that different from Santa Fe can it? There's a lot of suburban lawns that could support a lot of agriculture. A bicyclist can comfortably trave fifty miles a day if he has to. It seems that the biggest challenge will be to shift people to a more agriculturally based economy.

I might be an academic -- though in the guise of an at-home-parent right now -- but I would happily go about my beekeeping and goat raising in a new economy.

[Scott]

Dr. Doom raises the question of when.,

A glance at current events reveals a superpower dependent on infinite cheap supplies of crude oil, expending vast resources to prevent regional powers from staking a claim on the largest easiest to exploit crude oil reserves on the planet.

My guess is that when the U.S. is no longer capable of preventing China and Russia from dictating the distribution of the vast ME oil, our ability to import 60% of our daily consumption will end.

Another look at current events reveals a plateauing of daily production, refining and distribution of crude oil although growth rates in consumption are being maintained for China and Russia with minimal gains for the U.S.

Current events in the ME are all about controlling distribution of crude oil despite all the talk of religion,freedom or democracy. Keep your eye on the donut not the hole.

[Mike G]

Bill - "Fish and Chips" - "Boot" (not trunk of car)- "rationing" -"building societies" - "cycling to the next village" - you have to be a son of Blighty to talk of such things.

When rationing was in force - until around 1951 I think it was, certainly the amount of food available for feeding a family was meagre by today's standards. There were no eggs, only manky 'orrible little tins of dried egg, meat was scarce unless you got stuff on the black market, vegetables were mainly "greens" and cauli and pease, spuds were plentiful enough, butter for a household for a week was about the amount you might put in a couple of sandwiches today. Sugar and tea and milk were adequate but not abundant. Sweets were in very limited supply - my granny ran a newsagents/tobaccoonist/sweet shop and could get me more sweets than most kids could get, but that wasn't much. But the fact is that it is said people had a far healthier diet then than now - the government during the war and after had calculated accurately what were healthy amounts of protein, carbohydrate, fats and vitamins an individual needed. The result was that, though our diet was a bit dull at the time, it was healthy, and there were nowhere near the number of fat and obese wheezing gutbags waddling around heading for a coronary.

I walked a mile to primary school every day as did most kids (I lived up the "Big Smoke", not in the country). Secondary school, most of us still walked or took the bus or tube train or cycled in. There was no "school run" and no queues of mums and dads in the street revving their 4x4s outside the school entrance and pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. Mum regularly walked to the shops to get meat and groceries etc - most ordinary folk had no car. Dad went to work by bus. Many people in towns had allotments for growing veggies. Out in the country likewise, folk travelled around in the local buses or caught a train. Farms averaged 150 acres in the lowlands, and had hens scratching around, and pigs and perhaps at least a few dairy beasts, and bullocks, as well as cereals and turnips and grass for hay, and the crops were grown according to a proper rotation. No agribusiness factory farms then. Qute a lot of farmers still used horses, or had small "Fergie" tractors that burned a fraction the amount of diesel today's roaring monsters gulp down. Most farm workers had a back garden and kept a pig and grew spuds and carrots and greens and beans and pease. As for entertainment - there was the radio - "Billy Cotton", "Music while you work", "Family Favourites" etc; music hall still operated; mum and dad went off to the "Flicks" every Wednesday and Saturday and left me with granny. And there was a primitive television in black and white, six inch screen, BBC only and not starting till 6 0'clock: Gilbert Harding, Hopalong Cassidy and Eammon Andrews!!

Mr Kunstler seems to be looking towards an inevitable return to a way of life perhaps not dissimilar to what we have lost - or abandoned to "progress". Certainly, if the oil starts to run out and global warming continues apace, our present carbon squandering life style must inevitably die. In consequence, our communities and economies may indeed need to become more localised rather than globalised. Folk will not be able to commute long distances to work and entertainments and schools. and Tesco and Asda and Sainsburys will not be able to send HGVs pounding the motorways laden with Kenya grown asparagus or Peruvian courgettes or Mexican blackberries and pumping out all the carbon to melt Alpine glaciers and bring drought to the Amazon Basin and flood low lying Pacific island sovereign nations. But how is the transformation in our societies to be effected? Surely the great mass of people in developed countries do not have the skills and knowledge to live in the style of our forefathers. I try to imagine the average bank clerk, or science teacher, or executive, or factory production worker, or lorry driver or whatever trying to grow their own veggies or keeping hens or making their own clothes, or even having the will to do so. People are surely not so adaptable that in a few years they would be able to bring about a massive revolutionary change in the way our societies are run and organised. Any changeover must surely take decades, even a century; the trouble is that the need to change may come upon us in a far shorter time than the time in which we are capable of adapting our lives. One senses that possibly there may be a massive apocalyptic catastrophe that completely destroys life as we know it, carrying away the mass of the population around the globe, leaving only a hardy core to survive and carry on living, rather as in John Wyndham's "Day of the Triffids."

[just a thought]

Dr. Doom:

Because of your academic background, I would be interested in knowing your thoughts on global warming. I find myself much more fixated on resource depletion than global warming because the problem seems much more immediate, but then I wonder if I am being narcissistic or short-sighted.
I guess I have to admit that I wonder how much global warming is caused by things way beyond the control of man ... solar cycles, etc. ... Reading has also caused me to wonder if global warming could lead to global cooling and so I don't support the fanciful ideas promoted by some on how to cool the earth...
But many of the changes needed to adapt to resource depletion are also advocated by those wanting to stem global warming ... so I don't see the issues as incompatible...
What is your take on all this?

[XER]

All you Boomers better get off your morbidly obese asses to work on implementing Jim's plan of salvation. Get busy!