Activists should adjust strategies for end of oil

The world oil production peak is imminent and the natural gas peak will follow in our lifetimes. After these peaks, oil supplies will diminish and prices will keep rising. Our lives will change drastically because petrochemicals are irreplaceable for transportation, plastics, fertilizers, and in fact our American way of life. This imminent transition to a materially more 19th century way of life has tremendous implications for environmental activism today. We should expect and plan for these changes as we choose our strategies today.

Before offering suggestions, I would like to address the doubters. Renewable energy or hydrogen or as-yet-undiscovered technologies will not allow us to continue life as we know it. Like ethanol, hydrogen is an energy delivery system that requires almost equal amounts of energy to manufacture, store, and transport. Renewables will provide some electricity but cannot replace gasoline for transportation, oil for plastics, or oil and gas for heating. (For a longer discussion, read the new book, The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler.) Energy miracles could happen, but the evidence today suggests we shouldn't count on them.

Governments and businesses have no interest in telling us the truth. Politicians hate to deliver bad news, and businesses-as the auto industry has shown-have enormous trouble with paradigm shifts.

So what should we do? First, we should educate ourselves about possible futures.*

Second, we should educate government, business, and the public on how to make prudent choices now to facilitate the transition. Schedule meetings, give them books and articles, write letters, and so on. For example, rising oil prices mean that skyscraper construction should stop, period. We should tell planning commissions to cancel these projects. If the electricity grid goes down because of interrupted supplies or overuse, elevators and air conditioners will not function. Higher oil prices will discourage commuting and raise costs of building operation. In addition, who will buy a skyscraper in 30 years when the world's oil is mostly gone? How will they maintain it?

Obviously, the transition to a less energy-intensive way of life affects everything. So I will address only a few of environmentalists' most common concerns.

Land use is probably the area where we can be most effective. In a nut shell, we should be advocating for green-building, pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use, urban-agriculture, mass-transit living arrangements only. We do that now, but we should add that only such arrangements offer a livable environment in a situation of necessarily greater self- sufficiency and more expensive oil.

We should still advocate for mass transit, hybrid cars, and clean diesel. But we should add that building new roads, ports, airports, and other facilities that depend on cheap-oil-based transportation is a waste of taxpayer money. No government should sell transportation bonds for new roads that will have far fewer drivers as the 21st century progresses. The proposal to build a new airport should be scuttled.

Will governments, squeezed by a contracting economy, continue to allocate funds to preserve wilderness at current levels? I don't think so. Fewer rangers and higher maintenance costs will mean ineffective intervention against illegal loggers and squatters seeking arable land. At best, areas that are near current settlements could be protected by the community as mixed wilderness and agricultural land, albeit with constant pressure on the wilderness. True, some now-settled areas (e.g., most of Arizona) will revert to wilderness, and inaccessible or infertile areas will never be settled. But forests in particular will suffer. Perhaps widespread education in sustainable logging practices would help.

One area that people do not usually think of as affected by cheap energy is finance. But insurance, pensions, CDs, and other financial instruments all depend on underlying economic activity. If manufacturing shrinks, if construction slows down, if offices aren't occupied, your investments can't earn interest. What if you can't sell your home in Sprawl County? People will have savings, but the endless growth of interest will stop. Expect the consequences-including inflation-to rock the political world. We should start telling politicians that the transition will be more acceptable if livable, self-sustaining communities can compensate for the fact that most people will experience great financial dislocation.

In addition, we should create community nodules on the union hall or ecovillage model that will become community/skill building centers in the future. I can't emphasize this enough, because the fundamentalist religions will organize society if we don't.

The ramifications of the transition are endless. The above are just my first thoughts. I invite you to speculate on how to accomplish this transition in the most harmonious way, and how your activism should change today.

*www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net, www.museletter.com, www.lapostcarbon.org