World without oil - Winding Down

WINDING DOWN

I have just gotten around to reading Pachinko’s post.  It is difficult to realize that all of us will be returning to our own individual realities very soon.  There isn’t much time left for summaries; time now is our enemy.  My ability to summarize is abysmal at best, but here goes. The following are some of my miscellaneous thoughts on the past thirty weeks. 

In conversations with locals about the World With Out Oil project, I have encountered a lot of apathy.  Comments like “oh come on now we still have plenty of oil!’’ abounded.  I found that I needed to redefine “Peak Oil”.  Now whenever the conversation comes up I define “Peak Oil” as the stoppage of cheap oil.

As the WWO narrative got under way, it became painfully clear that an oil crisis could indeed develop.  Take a second to review what happened in the WWO reality.   Terrorists attacking supertankers, shutting off trade routes. There was a storm in the Gulf of Mexico. A cartel came together in Central and South America which refused to sell us oil at reasonable prices. Finally, an emerging superpower was successfully out bidding us for oil.  If all of these conditions happened simultaneously, we could be in serious trouble.  A “Peak oil crisis” is a definite possibility.  How do you prepare for such an event without going into 100% survivalist mode?

I think that we should all do a personal inventory of the extent of our own oil dependency.  Try to cut back on your dependency now when it will be easier.  Then do a personal inventory of your talents and skills.  If you have never grown any food before, what makes you think your first attempt will be successful?  How about basic home repair?  Can you teach?  Can you weave?  Hopefully you get the idea.  After the positives, look at the negatives.  What skills or talents are you lacking?  This is where building a community comes in.  Seek out people interested in pooling skills and resources.  Do this now while the next Peak oil crisis exists as an intellectual pursuit rather than a real time disaster. And for heavens sake seek council of the elders in your community.  Unless you are totally socially challenged like me, this shouldn’t be too hard to do.  You might even strike up some new acquaintances if not friendships along the way.

Will our new attitude be a minority stance?  Yep.  However I think that the majority of the Netizens have no faith in their government’s ability to respond. (At the time of this writing I still have not heard back from Senator Levin, not that I really expected to)  It might do us all some good to begin to speak up now.  To this end, I came up with an idea.  I fully acknowledge that this idea borders, if not crosses over into lunacy, but perhaps the idea will inspire some of our brilliant members to come up with something more pragmatic.

As l have mentioned, our collective time in this reality is coming to a close.  Will this exercise only be beneficial to those who participated?    I certainly have expanded my thinking on possible outcomes based on the shrinking availability of cheap oil.  We all have.  But is this how it ends?  Possibly there might be some sort of special on PBS (after all, we have been doing this on CPB’s nickel) but how many people are going to be reached?  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this experience could be morphed into something that reached a large audience?  There might be a way……….

I will have to digress a bit in order to set this idea up.  The World With Out Oil experience is very similar to some of the exercises that the American government does on a regular basis.  Most of you are probably familiar with the famous (infamous?) “Operation Dark Winter”, conducted at Andrews AFB in June of 2001.  If you have not seen this 44 page pdf, I need to warn you that this is a worse case scenario.  And Tara O’Tool is a master at scaring people half to death.  After looking this document over you can see how these exercises are conducted.

What would happen if each one of the top three presidential candidates were to participate in a peak oil crisis scenario based on the narrative that we created in this reality?  After the exercise was completed, the results would be made public.  Now that would be a kick butt PBS special!  At least two points would surface very quickly.  First, which candidate has a firm grasp on America’s oil addiction and second, who has leadership skills and who does not.

In all reality, I don’t think that any of the candidates “handlers” (read marketer) would allow participation.  There is too much at stake.  The chance of a misstep by a candidate in such an exercise is very real.  After all, the only goal of any marketer is to sell a product, caring not about quality; their job it to sell. 

But wouldn’t it be nice if such an event could come about?  Think how much could we learn about a candidate’s character and their ability to lead.

So, I guess for now my idea shall remain,

Just a thought

Megiddo