Runnin’ on Empty May

On the Cover of the Rolling Stone

Wanna see our pictures on the cover

Wanna buy five copies for our mothers

Wanna see my smilin’ face

On the cover of the Rolling Stone

--Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show, 1972

Well, boys and girls, it’s now a bona fide, real, true, honest-to-goodness, red-white-and-blue American situation we’ve got on our hands. First, you read about it in Hipfish. Then, March 14 and May 3, Peak Oil made the Congressional Record and CSPAN when two conservative Republicans, Maryland’s Roscoe Bartlett and Wayne Gilchrest, delivered lengthy warnings to Congress. On April 8, San Francisco Chronicle columnist David Lazarus reacted to Bay Area corporation ChevronTexaco’s $16.4 billion acquisition of Unocal as proof that oil has peaked. The list increases exponentially. But, that’s not all.

We made April’s Rolling Stone. In an excerpt from his new book The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler reported, “the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production,” adding, “It will change everything about how we live.”

Don’t know about you, but I don’t need to be smacked up side the head with a 2x4 to pay attention when something’s going down that could drastically change my life.

Seems the question is no longer whether Peak Oil exists or when, but what we should be doing about it. And, there’s plenty we can do.

Here are some ideas. First: Get informed. There are dozens of books, websites, online newspaper archives, and the alternative press. Second: Get informed. Increase your “oil awareness.” Begin to realize that everything around you is made of oil, grown with oil, manufactured using electricity or machines powered by oil, transported from somewhere else using oil. As oil and natural gas become increasingly expensive, the price of nearly everything will rise in tandem. Third: Get informed. Take stock of how long it would take you to become “self-sufficient” with regard to food, water, shelter, clothing, medicines, work and debt, independent of gasoline-based transportation or electricity. Talk about it with your friends.

There’s no reason to panic, but there’s every reason to consider self-sufficiency, sustainable lifestyles, independence, and interdependence. There’s every reason to research personal and community alternative energy sources like wind and solar, to strengthen community ties, support community businesses, consider a community currency and work toward decreasing our community’s dependence on oil and natural gas.

After all, how many of us have said we’d like to live a less stressful life? Spend more time with family? Have time to visit with friends and to just relax without a thought as to what is waiting to be done? Take time to “smell the roses”? What has all our frenetic rushing gotten us that’s so all-fired important, anyway? What might it be like to create a community where everyone who wants to be is employed, where everyone’s work has value, where what we do counts and contributes, where we know we’re part of the solution, not part of the problem? Where we know that the air we breathe and the fish we catch and the lifestyle we lead are not going to cause us cancer in ten years? What might it be like to be in on the ground floor in creating such a community? Why are we always so willing to let “them” bring us their “progress” from the outside? And, have you ever noticed that their “progress” benefits them more than it does us?

“Ok, so what if I prepare and nothing happens? Y2K didn’t happen,” you ask, petulantly. I remember the few, simple preparations I made. I paid off debt, made a few car payments in advance, stored some basic grains and a half dozen gallons of water. It did me no harm; it just made 2000 a very easy year. Take the 1989 California 7.1 earthquake. I lived 3 miles from the epicenter. The biggest aftershock? Economic. Tourists stopped coming in January. Local consumers were broke. The economic downturn rippled through the county for years. I’ve learned to respect prudent preparedness.

“All this peak oil stuff is 30 years away and what you write is just your opinion,” you chide. People like to use the words “opinion” and “belief” these days, but neither requires more foundation than a four-year-old’s conviction that an elephant with big ears can fly, so long as he holds a feather with his trunk. Both words require faith and often thrive sans information. I feel safer with research, evidence, informed judgment. So, I’ll leave you until next month with my paraphrase of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callahan:

I know what you’re thinking. “Is this the year or do we have 30 years?” Well, to tell you the truth, despite all my research I’m not 100% positive myself. But, being as this is Peak Oil we’re talking about, the most powerful emergency in the world and would make the Black Plague look like a mild flu epidemic, you’ve got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky?