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13. LIFE AFTER THE OIL CRASH


The apocalypse is coming - it's time to recycle your manure and get a socially responsible vasectomy. Peak-oil buffs are preparing for a future where oil is so scarce that people will go hungry


Patrick White
Toronto Globe and Mail
March 7, 2008


The grab-your-gun-and-head-for-the-hills scenario goes something like this: In the next year or so, world oil production will peak and then promptly plummet, forced down by sinking reserves. While supply crashes, demand will grow. Virtually overnight, fuel will become so dear that farm tractors will go idle, people will go hungry and homes will go cold. Financial markets will collapse and social chaos will follow.

Are you ready?

The doomsday image may sound like the half-baked plot of a Schwarzenegger flick, but thousands of North Americans are taking it seriously enough to stock up on non-perishable food, recycle their own manure, build home gardens, bone up on canning techniques, even undergo "socially responsible vasectomies" to limit their energy reliance.

With the price of a barrel of oil spiking upwards of $100, the more alarmist of peak-oil buffs are buzzing that the world's oil-dependent economy could tank in the very near future.
These "doomers," as they're called among the peaknik community, congregate online at DieOff.org, AnthroPik.com and dozens of other apocalyptic sites dedicated to discussing when the sky will fall and what to do afterward.

One of the most popular sites, LifeAfterTheOilCrash.net, casts the looming crisis in dreary terms. "Dear Reader," it reads. "Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse bible prophecy sect, or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is the scientific conclusion of the best paid, most widely respected geologists, physicists, bankers and investors in the world. These are rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely terrified by a phenomenon known as global 'Peak Oil.' "

The site owner, a California lawyer, advocates getting in shape to prepare for a new era of manual labour, and provides links to companies that hawk dehydrated food and emergency survival kits.
Some environmentalists bristle at such grim proclamations. "It's simply fear-mongering," says Guy Dauncey, author of Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change. "When you mention collapse and heading for the hills, that saps the creativity we need to get out of this problem."

Doomers come in many shades of gloom. Paul Chefurka, an Ottawa-based civil servant, identifies as a doomer but distances himself from the "buy-canned-food-and-bullets crowd."

"You can't prepare for everything," he says. "At this point any vision of the future is just as likely to be wrong as right."
The concept of peak oil attracted Mr. Chefurka's attention four years ago just as interest in the theory was flourishing online. The theory, which posits that oil production will inevitably hit a zenith and subsequently spiral into terminal decline, had been around for 50 years, but numerous endorsements from geologists and oil experts swelled its profile around 2002.

Mr. Chefurka had spent much of his life denying the existence of global warming and the ills of greenhouse gases. One day, while researching greenhouse gases online, he came across several sites dedicated to peak oil. "About 30 seconds later I was a changed man," he says. "I could see right away that they made an awfully good case."
He immediately fell into the extreme doomer camp, adopting an "apocalyptic sense of imminent catastrophe." He has since softened the fatalist stance and is predicting more of a protracted economic downturn. But that hasn't stopped him from making some drastic changes to cut his oil dependency.

In recent years, he has moved from a suburban McMansion to an urban bungalow, downsized his car and curbed his air travel. He started a food garden on his small urban lot that supplies 20 per cent of his and his wife's fare during the warmer months. What they can't eat, they've started canning for the leaner winter months.
On his website, PaulChefurka.ca, he encourages readers to eat lower on the food chain, retrofit their homes and "consider not having children." Mr. Chefurka himself has had a "socially responsible vasectomy."

"We've got too many people on Earth doing too much," he says. "Unless family is more important than anything else, you might want to consider not having one."
Other peakniks are making smaller changes. Paul Fieguth, a University of Waterloo professor and father of three, has cut back the number of conferences he flies to, lowered his home thermostat to about 18 C and started walking to work.

"I don't think oil will drop off a cliff in three years and that we should all start growing parsnips," he says.
Dr. Fieguth has also started budgeting for a severe economic depression, when he thinks his income could drop to one-fifth of what it currently is.
"We've been lulled into a false sense of security," he says. "There were people saying, 'Let the good times roll' back in the late 1920s, too. Where did they end up?"

While Mr. Chefurka moved closer to the city in his effort to shrink his oil reliance, others are moving away. In the mid-nineties, Patrick Déry, a physicist and energy analyst, helped establish Ecohameau de La Baie, a community near Chicoutimi, Que., made up of six straw-bale houses on a 30-acre farm where a dozen children and 10 adults experiment with living oil-free.

"We are ready to face the challenge of peak oil," Mr. Déry says.
The idea of the eco-village is to wean families off the fuel combustion that brings food to stores and heat to homes. Residents harvest vegetables, eggs, grains, milk and meat on the farm. They use a combination of wood-burning and solar energy for heat and they're planning to start generating electricity from a nearby waterfall. To reduce their need for outside fertilizers, all human manure is returned to the fields.

Aside from a tractor and a car pool, the families have little dependence on fossil fuels.
"Most people are not thinking of the future," Mr. Déry says. "That's okay. If the worst problems of peak oil ever come, they can use what we've learned here to make a smooth transition. We are not a hippie commune or a survivalist camp, we're taking a serious scientific approach."

The science of predicting peak oil is still a matter of crystal balls and crackpot formulas. Some peakniks insist that peak oil has already passed; some say it's 20 or 30 years off. Others say Western society will have at least a century to adopt alternative energy sources.
Peter Ireland, a Vancouver native now living in Washington State, has bounced between extremes since he started reading about peak oil in 2003.

"At first I got sucked in by the real doom-and-gloom crowd," he says. "Everyone talked seriously about this Road Warrior-like future."
That pessimistic group published thousands of blog posts and several books. Some gathered at festivals and workshops where they learned to build bows and arrows, hunt and survive in the woods.
"After prolonged daily exposure," Mr. Ireland says, "you get into a pretty negative mindset reading their stuff.

"These days I think that even in a worst-case scenario we'll simply move to a rationing-type system we had during World War II. Society won't collapse. Capitalism is like one of those characters in horror movies. You think he's dead, but when you look over your shoulder he just keeps coming. It's not a perfect system, but it's certainly resilient."

Edited by Superglide Ken - 08/March/2008 at 1:23pm