Peak oil in transition

It was nearly five years ago that I discovered the peak oil debate, and at the time, it was all doom and gloom. In fact, Matt Savinar’s primer, The Oil Age Is Over (sadly now out of print), ends with a discussion about the depression one typically suffers after the penny drops about peak oil. Arguably, though, the debate is still one of doom and gloom today, and the purists among us are only too ready to howl down anything touted as a solution.

We can do better.
I can vouch for the concept of post-peak depression. I remember when I ran out of both questions and answers, and I remember how helpless I felt at the time, as if the only way not to lose was not to play. The best way out of this funk is to do something positive. For me, getting around my oil dependency meant less car travel, working out public transport again, and getting a bicycle. I’m still going with that.

When you consider most problems so fundamentally, the solutions are simple too. If you’re worried about food miles, buy local produce from suburban markets. The dominance of large supermarkets and department stores can be mitigated by shopping elsewhere, even if you can’t buy everything in the one place. Learn to turn things off when you’re not using them, and not to buy things you don’t need. Even questions about money – from the siphoning off of local investment by major banks, to the very nature of fiat currency itself – seem tractable when considered the same way.

The point of these individual tasks is two-fold. First, you participate less and less in a system that will break off in massive chunks in the coming decades and crumble into the sea. (With that mental image, you and Antarctica are in this together.)

Second, the more you think about this, the more you learn and understand the way things really are in the world. New challenges will come along in our current convention, and current conventional thinking won’t solve them; you will need a new paradigm. Either way, you’re doing something positive about the world’s plethora of problems, and coming shocks won’t be quite so shocking.

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