Transcript PEAK OIL PREP & MAKING THE SHIFT TO SUSTAINABILITY
WHEN TECHNOLOGY FAILS
Self-Reliance, Sustainability & Surviving the Long Emergency
www.whentechfails.com
www.matstein.com
“Is it not already too late if one waits until one is thirsty to begin digging a well?.” —Chinese Proverb
Why I Wrote When Technology Fails
I asked for “guidance & inspiration” and received a pictorial outline for the whole book!
The voice of inspiration indicated that huge numbers of people would need this information soon!
How Might Technology Fail?
• Natural: Fire, earthquake, hurricane, tornado, etc.
• Major Grid Melt-Down: EMP or solar storm; terrorism, earthquake or superstorm. • Pandemic (like 1919 Spanish Flu, which killed 50-100 million worldwide and pretty much shut everything down for months) • Peak Oil / The “Perfect Storm” • Financial melt-down or societal collapse
EMP / Solar Super Storms
• May 1921 solar storm 10X as strong as 1989 storm that knocked out Quebec Hydro main transformer. 1859 Carrington Event 50% stronger than May 1921 storm.
• If either event happened today, grid down for years except in tropical latitudes.
• Single EMP from terrorist or rogue state air burst nuke disrupts Dallas to Quebec!
• HILF event (High Impact Low Frequency) game changing, economy busting, government toppling, mega-event.
Really, how bad is the situation on planet Earth?
• We are facing certain environmental collapse if we keep doing business in the same way as we have been • • A “Perfect Storm” is building from six threats, each of which are potential civilization busters on their own.
If we do not confront these threats directly and collectively, thus changing the course of this “Perfect Storm”, these trends will guarantee the collapse of civilization as we know it!
The Perfect Storm: Six Trends Converging on Collapse
• Climate Change / “Global Weirding” • Peak Oil • Collapse of the World’s Oceans • Deforestation • Food Crisis: Soils / Water / Climate • Population and Overshoot Today’s talk is more focused on Peak Oil because barring some miracle or catastrophe that will hit us hard in the next few years!
We all Know the Weather is Changing
• The ten warmest years on record all occurred since 1990.
• Due to a few hundred years of burning fossil fuels, over ½ of which has occurred since 1980, our atmosphere has more carbon dioxide now than it has had for the last million years. • Other green house gasses collectively contribute about the same effect as carbon dioxide.
• MIT study says climate change is “accelerating” and could reach 6.3 F, which would collapse global food production long before that was reached.
• Climate scientists say they have a 90% certainty that man is causing current climate change. The media focuses on that 10% uncertainty, but would you fly on a plane that had a 9 out of 10 chance of crashing? • There is a global “climate conspiracy”—a well documented conspiracy of powerful oil, coal and gas companies to cloud the issue with “junk scientists” and bogus experts.
Why is this happening?
What is “Peak Oil”?
Oil Companies Have Mega-Money and Technology, But Oil Discoveries Peaked in the 1960’s!
World’s Oil Field Depletion
• In 2008, the International Energy Agency (IEA) study shows world’s major oil fields declining at 9.1% per year.
• Why doubled previous years estimate? (DATA!) • With investments of major $ for Enhanced Oil Recovery methods (EOR), rate is 6.4% per year.
• Keeping up with this depletion would require the discovery and development of Saudi Arabia sized mega-oil fields every few years from now to eternity —
An Impossible Fantasy!!
• We are consuming oil about 4X faster than we are finding new oil reserves!
Why Should we Care?
•A 5% drop in global oil production in the 1970’s resulted in gas rationing, a major recession, and tripled gas prices at the pump.
•Fossil fuels are feedstocks for synthetic fertilizers and fuel the machinery to feed 6X what the world could feed using draft animals.
• Buying foreign oil has been called, “The largest, most rapid, wealth transfer in history”. • The Credit Crisis + The Coming Energy Crisis = The Perfect Financial Storm
Official USGS Oil Predictions
Government figures typically project that oil supplies will keep increasing to match demand while ignoring the hard facts of depletion. US, British, and German militaries recently released reports warning of potential problems in 2012, and severe shortages by 2015!
Our Oceans are Dying
• 11 out of 15 of the world’s major ocean fisheries are in serious decline or collapse • 1/3 of all commercial species of ocean fish are below 10% of previous levels (definition of collapse), and large predatory fish, like tuna, marlin and swordfish, are already gone.
90% of the ocean’s • Coral reefs, the “rainforests of the ocean” are dying at record rates. By 2004, 20% were gone, up from just 11% in 2002, and another 26% in serious trouble.
• Ocean acidification, global warming’s “Evil Twin” threatening shellfish, coral reefs, crustaceans, and possibly many planktons (British study shows 73% drop in oceanic zooplankton since 1960, 50% since 1990).
Our Forests are Disappearing
• Forests are critical to the water cycle on our planet • The evaporative surface area of a single large tree’s needles or leaves is roughly equal to a 40-acre lake, and a single rain forest tree will pump over 3 million gallons of water back into the atmosphere over its lifetime. • Roughly ½ of our forests are gone, and much of the reminder is in serious trouble. When the trees are gone, soil disappears and downwind farmlands turn into deserts.
• In the next 24 hours, deforestation will release as much CO2 as 8 million people flying from London to New York • Deforestation accounts for roughly 25% of all greenhouse gas emissions —nearly as much as all transportation and industry put together!
Food Crisis
• For the first time since the “green Revolution” started our world is producing less food each year.
• Climate change contributing far more to losses than technology to gains.
• Increasing food riots in 2008-2010 threatening the stability of many governments.
• In 2010, extended droughts threatening the breadbaskets of China and India, home to more than 1/3 of the world’s population.
• Irrigation accounts for 16% of world’s cropland, but 40% of its food, and it is declining due to climate change, unsustainable water usage, and soil depletion.
Population: The Elephant in the Closet
We Have Overshot Our World’s Bio-Capacity
We Would Need 4.5 Earths, and Unlimited Oil, If We All Lived Like the USA
Coping with a changing world
•
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” —Charles Darwin
• We all buy car insurance, but most of us don’t plan on getting into a wreck
.
Peak Oil & emergency prep are forms of disaster insurance.
• A few skills, preparations and planning can bring great peace of mind
Bumps In The Road
• Even if we do everything just right, we face probable failures in central services for significant chunks of time.
• If we continue “business as usual”, we face almost certain systemic collapse.
• The old Yankee adage says it all: “Hope for the best, but plan for the worst.”
Start with a 72-Hour Grab-and-Run Kit
• Provides food, water, first aid and basic emergency supplies for yourself and family for three days or more.
• Thorough list in my book, or for free at
www.whentechfails.com
• 1 gallon H2O per person per day X a family of four weighs 100 pounds! • Water filter with carbon core plus “Steripen” and/or “PolarPure”
Surviving the Long Emergency
• Self reliance is the key • Develop mental and physical skills now, while everything is still working reasonably well • Learn gardening skills and connect with the Earth —use a community garden/window gardens if you have no suitable land.
• Develop your wilderness skills. Start with some car camping and graduate to backpacking / mountaineering.
• Local energy co-ops could still provide services after major grid melt-downs
Self-Reliance
• Foraging skills- Arizona survival story • Build library of “old timer” skills: Carla Emery, When Technology Fails, and ref guides • Better to drop back to 1800’s level than a “Mad Max” scenario, or “caveman days” • In initial “vision” back in 1997, I “saw” that even with my engineering background, and backcountry experience, if I was dropped in the Amazon basin, could not reproduce any of modern day technology. Develop shared skill sets and tools in your community!
Gas Rationing & Shortages
• Odd-even rationing of the 70’s won’t work due to self service stations (no attendants) • Matthew Simmons said US officials were on the verge of printing up rationing books after Hurricane Ike • Plug-in hybrids, motor scooters and electric bicycles provide hedge against rationing. • Most fuel injected vehicles can “learn” to run on ethanol. Can distill ethanol locally.
Transition Communities
• Communities planning for Peak Oil and climate change.
• Re-localizing agriculture and production of essential goods.
• Develop local mass transit and ability to live our lives with little or no autos.
• Develop local energy coops based on bio fuels, solar, wind, tides, etc.
• Community ownership of local energy projects has local multiplier effect on the economy.
• Network! No one knows or has it all! • Local currency, trade and barter.
First Aid and Self Healing
• I encourage every adult to take advanced first aid and CPR training —this could save your life! • Factory farms put antibiotics into animal feed —making these animals, and our bodies, into factories for breeding antibiotic resistant super-bugs!
• Simple things—like homemade colloidal silver, hyssop, oregano oil, homeopathy, etc. can heal when pharmaceuticals fail or unavailable
10 Steps for Making Shift Happen!
1) Change the tax structure
We must make it financial suicide for companies to do business unsustainable ways! Plan B will only succeed if we shift the tax structure to support those materials, processes, industries and investments that contribute to sustainability, while penalizing those industries and structures that stick to the “old way” of doing things
2) Rebuild our cities & Homes
By restructuring our cities for mass transportation, moving away from their current focus centered on the individual automobile, and retrofitting our buildings for energy efficiency and renewables we could make our buildings net energy producers! The crash in the building market could be turned around with easy credit and tax incentives to retrofit buildings, putting America back to work while cutting green house gas emissions and reducing oil imports and trade deficits.
3) Rebuild our railways, waterways, and mass transit
• A world running short on oil must focus on efficiency rather than simple convenience. If we don’t act now, how will most of us get around, or ship our goods, when gas goes to $10 or $20 dollars a gallon and we don’t have any decent alternatives to diesel trucks for long distance hauling and private gasoline powered automobiles for local transportation?
4)
Rebuild our industries
• There must be domestic and international financial incentives to revitalize economies while saving energy and materials through junking old inefficient processes and machines and replacing them with state-of-the-art technologies. By sharing renewable and sustainable technologies with the developing world, we will do our part to ensure that we leave behind a world that can feed and sustain our children. We will fail If we take care of our own country without replacing the inefficient processes and industries of rapidly industrializing giants like India and China.
5)
Fund and support renewable energy development
• Focus on the rapid development of renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, geothermal, and biofuels. Particular emphasis on wind power, which is already cost competitive with coal. When you level the playing field by eliminating subsidies, wind energy is already more cost effective than coal, nuclear, or oil for the generation of electricity. [ currently a 10:1 subsidy advantage of fossil fuels over renewables]
6)
Eliminate population growth
• Reduce global population growth to the point where the population of our planet levels off, followed by a decline in world population. On a planet where the estimated long-term carrying capacity may be on the order of 1 to 2 billion people, if we can’t control our own population growth, nature will do it for us.
7)
Share the wealth and knowledge
• Must make it economically preferable for third world countries to preserve vital resources like rain forests and coral reefs, rather than to liquidate for short term gain.
• The developing countries of the world all want what the Western countries already have (decent food, clean water and standard of living) • By sharing new sustainable technologies with the developing world, we can help to significantly improve their standard of living while at the same time allowing them to leapfrog older coal and oil-based technologies.
8)
Replace coal-burning power plants
• If we are to stand a chance for capping greenhouse gas emissions, current coal burning power plant technology must be replaced. If a successful carbon dioxide sequestering technology proves feasible, we could continue to burn coal, but only when the new technology is in place.
9)
Global Relocalization: Buy Local!
• Economies are bound to relocalize as energy and transportation costs rise, making it once again both environmentally and economically beneficial to live, work, produce, grow, and buy locally. • Buying local helps keep our dollars circulating locally in what is known as the “local multiplier effect.” • In the United States, the average item of food traveled 1,518 miles in 1998, and this number has been increasing about 10 percent per decade.
10)
Make all decisions based on sustainability
• Sustainability must be incorporated into society with “religious fervor” • All business decisions should be made while giving serious consideration as to whether that particular decision contributes toward sustainability or takes us farther from the goal of creating a sustainable world. • We must legislate and regulate sustainability. • Doing business in non-sustainable ways must be financial suicide, or this game will be over and we all lose!
What Can I Do?
• Reduce—Reuse—Recycle: a “food chain” of energy and materials conservation • For example: 1.8 tons of raw materials are used to manufacture the average PC, and most of these materials are dumped somewhere as waste. • So, when you repair an item rather than throwing it “away,” you are reducing your consumption and ecological footprint on the planet. • Carpool, ride trains, bus, a bike.
Planet-friendly diet
• Health and environmental impacts from the agribusiness production of meat range from massive destruction of rainforests for cattle grazing to methane pollution and the consumption of huge amounts of pesticides, oil, fertilizer, water, vegetable protein, and topsoil. Fisheries are collapsing across the planet due to annual catches that far exceed the sustainable rate, combined with destructive practices, such as the use of huge driftnets. Eating less meat and wild fish helps the planet.
“Raising the livestock needed to produce the 276 million tons of meat consumed in 2006 was responsible for almost a fifth of total greenhouse gas emissions.”
—The Worldwatch Institute,
Vital Signs 2007 –2008
Humans Are Social Animals
• Take a look at the person next to you. Look him or her in the eye. Most disasters, bring out the best in people! • Most of us do better in groups than alone • Community allows us to pool skills/resources • There is strength and security in numbers.
• Community renewable energy co-ops have been very successful in Europe and can provide local energy security against grid failures.
CAN WE DO THIS?
• After Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt called on the manufacturing power of Detroit to support the war effort 100%.
• In just 6 months, Detroit switched completely to supporting the war effort. All private cars production was shut down.
• Huge targets were set, that many felt were “impossible”. Not only were these targets reached, they were far exceeded!
How Do We Do This?
“Backcasting” is an incredibly valuable tool for mapping out a viable path to reach a future we all want.
It gets around the pitfalls of projecting the past into the future, and being limited by the same outdated modes of thinking that got us into trouble in the first place.
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
—Albert Einstein
We Can Do This!
• We never would have defeated Hitler if it was number 10 on our priority list.
• Some say people will never change.
• How many cannibals do you know?
• How many slave owners do you know?
• Only 1/6 of the world’s annual military budget to implement “Plan B”!
• Is not our physical and economic survival worth this price?
MY MOTTO: