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Page added on May 9, 2013
Peak Oil’s Impact: Getting to School
Oil plays an essential role in almost everything that touches our everyday lives. From the food we eat to the means by which we transport ourselves, our goods, and our services, to what we grow, build, have, own, need, and do, oil is almost always an important element. But the painful truth now and soon is that the ready supply of oil and gas that we almost always take for granted is on its way to becoming not-so-ready—recent production increases notwithstanding.
What happens when there’s not enough to meet all of our demands, to say nothing of those of every other nation—including the many countries seeking more growth and prosperity? What sacrifices will we be called upon to make? Which products will no longer be as readily available? Which services? Who decides? What will be decided? Who delivers that message to the designers and producers and shippers and end users? What’s their Plan B? And how will we respond when decisions are taken out of our hands? Where exactly will the dominoes tumble?
There is nothing on the horizon that will work as an adequate substitute for the efficiencies and low cost and ease of accessibility that oil has provided us. We simply do not have the means to make that happen—not the technological capabilities, not the personnel, not the industries, not the leadership … yet. Clearly, we do not have enough time to do it all with effortless ease and minimal disruptions.
Piecemeal approaches that address some small aspect of need for some short period of time in some limited geographical area for just a few consumers is in the end a monumental waste of limited resources, time, and effort. We can’t wait until we’re up to our eyeballs in Peak Oil’s impact to start figuring out what to do. We’re too close as it is. We’re going to have to be much better, much wiser, and much more focused. **
Here’s the latest contribution to my Peak Oil’s Impact series—observations and commentary on how Peak Oil’s influence will be felt in little, never-give-it-thought, day-to-day aspects of the conventional crude oil-based Life As We’ve Known It. Changes in all that we do, use, own, make, transport, etc., etc., are inevitable. A little food for thought….
I don’t need a watch or a clock weekday mornings to know when it’s eight o’clock. All I need to do is peek outside my office window at home and watch the procession of automobiles queuing up in front of our home. It begins about five minutes before eight, and ten minutes later, the long line of cars has vanished.
For comical relief, watching the procession of cars inch up the long hill (which is essentially all that my street is) is especially amusing when it’s snowing. Freezing rain is a hoot!
About one hundred feet to the left of my house is a fairly busy residential intersection, all the more so at morning rush hour. One block over is my town’s only middle school. Three blocks to the west is one of a half-dozen or so elementary schools. The intersection is a short break from hill climbing. The elementary school sits even farther up the hill from where I am. So when most cars are stuck in traffic at the nearby intersection in snow and ice, we’re usually serenaded by the sounds of wheels spinning to gain any traction at all. On more than a few occasions, drivers have turned around and risked driving back down the hill in those same conditions because they simply cannot gain enough traction to continue the climb.
It’s not nearly as much fun as it seems, given that we face the same dilemma as soon as we back out of our driveway: skate downhill or hope we find a sweet spot on the road which enables us to make the climb.
Almost all of these morning drivers are dropping their children off at one/both of the neighborhood schools. Our town does not supply bus transportation for most students. Many walk to and from the two schools, but others can’t or don’t for whatever reason. No doubt these similar scenes play out who knows how many millions of times each and every school day across the country.
And we’re back to the standard question I’ll continue to ask until we collectively start finding answers: When the supply of depleting conventional crude oil continues to decline, and reliance turns to the inadequate supply of inferior quality, more expensive, harder to come by unconventional sources such as the tight shale formations in the U.S. and the Canadian tar sands cheered on by certain factions of the energy and media industries, what gets prioritized in our own homes and in our communities when dealing with transporting our children to and from school?
What adjustments will even higher prices and less availability of transportation fuels oblige us all to make in this most routine of daily parenting rituals? If walking/biking is not an option for whatever reasons, what’s our Plan B for getting our children to and from school each day? What’s the local school system’s plan? Teachers own transportation issues?
I’m thinking we’ll need more than a school committee meeting or two to figure this out. When might we start thinking about this issue (the list is growing)?
9 Comments on "Peak Oil’s Impact: Getting to School"
LT on Thu, 9th May 2013 10:57 pm
Have you ever walked into a high school building in America in the summer? It feels like winter is comming! The thermosat is often set at 60F or so. And the opposite is true in the winter months as well: It feels like summer in the inside while the outside temperatures is in 40s-50s. Every elementary, junior, and high school building complex is an energy monster in itself. The energy consume by one high school building complex in America can be used to power a city in a third world country such as Daramsala in northern India. We rush to the dark-age by design!
BillT on Fri, 10th May 2013 1:45 am
Well, schools operated before cars and buses. I lived in a small town and walked to school, 3 blocks away.
For one year (1955), we lived in the country and my younger sister and I walked 1 1/2 miles each way to a one room country school. Walked, not taken. Snow, ice, rain, no difference. My class mates also walked. It was heated by a big coal furnace in the back of the room. Out-houses for personal business. Water carried by two students from the neighbors hand-pump well. And I learned more that year than any other in the town schools.
In this day of cheap laptops, certainly a system could be developed to teach at home. Send each kid a laptop with that year’s curriculum installed and access to the internet. Responsibility for learning would be the parents and the students. They could proceed at their own pace. Imagine a class on math taught by an Einstein and illustrated using the talents of George Lucas and ILM. And it would be at a fraction of today’s cost. Maybe 1/5 or less.
Beery on Fri, 10th May 2013 2:37 am
My daughter and I ride our bikes 2 miles to school every weekday, whether it’s sunny, windy, raining or snowing. The only oil our vehicles need is a little on the chain every few weeks. Whether the school is 2 miles or 5 miles distant, I see no peak oil adjustments in our commuting future.
If walking or biking are not an option, my guess is that, as BillT suggests, remote teaching will start to become more common, just as is the case in some places in Australia.
GregT on Fri, 10th May 2013 5:41 am
The children of the future will need to be taught how to grow and preserve food, make and mend clothing, and scavenge the remains of industrial civilization for their very survival. Most, if not all of these skills, will be learned from home, or involvement in a small local community.
Airwicky on Fri, 10th May 2013 5:43 am
I didn’t expect BillT to get all techie on us. As oil gets more expensive… less and less people will be able to afford laptops and much less internet service. It’ll be completely unfair to those can’t afford such things. I never see that expanding beyond college courses.
Hugh Culliton on Fri, 10th May 2013 11:10 am
Several years ago, while standing bus duty, I pondered the fuel cost of bussing. Mine is a geographically large school board in rural Ontario and transportation as a cost is second only to salary. Consider: each school bus uses approximately $400.00 of fuel per day. There are about 250 buses and approximately 150 school days. It works out to $15,000,000.00 per year to move students. I predict that in the next 20 years, public education is going to go back to a distributed one-room school house model. Perhaps with computers to allow virtual classes, but however it works out, we will definitely be moving away from our current industrial public education model.
DC on Fri, 10th May 2013 11:15 am
Humanity educated itself just fine long before anyone ever heard of a school bus or a wifi network. How do people think we figured out how to make a ruin of the world? All those unpowered schools laid the foundation for everything you see around you now.
Every day, I ride by the school, which is conveniently located by the highway, at 3’oC, its a solid mass of idling busses and even better, a endless lineup of 5000 pound gas-burners.
All there to chauffeur, what? 70-80 pounds of human a few miles? Naturally moms and dads sit there idling as well with there ACs on full tilt in summer, and heat in the winter, often times puffing away on there cigs or just plain not paying attention to much of anything besides the movements of there fellow gas-burners.
Centralized factory style schools must have seemed like a good idea at one point, but even hanging around outside one at 3pm will quickly cure anyone of that notion, let alone what goes on inside.
Schoolmaster on Fri, 10th May 2013 1:30 pm
Schools are a great scam for public employee guild monopolies. Not so good for students or parents. Sending a kid to most dumbed down schools is parental malpractice.
GregT on Fri, 10th May 2013 3:43 pm
It was cheap excess energy, that gave us both the time, and the resources needed, to educate our children. The same cheap excess energy, that gave us the education and resources that have enabled us to lay ruin to the world.
That cheap excess energy will become less accessible to more and more people as time goes on. More and more people will need to return back to a life of survival and sustainability. Cheap excess energy has allowed us to create a false environment within the confines of the natural environment. When that energy is no longer available, or affordable, back to the natural environment we will go.
If we continue to ruin the natural environment to the point that it can longer support us, then we will have nowhere at all, left to go.