[AndIFeelFine]

...Or, "A Modest Proposal".

I have been a long time lurker at the Peak Oil forums. I was not sure if i should put this in the "Planning" forum or not, so put it in "Open" instead. I desired to post my own thoughts here, but I shuddered at the idea of adding yet another frivoulous message to the general semantic noise wihich infests all human communication to date. So, I waited. Amd now that I am drunk right out of my mind, I finally feel qualified to make that first post.

There is now, for the first time, a comprehensive guide to peak oil survival.

I believe that there will be a certain number of bare bones truths to life in a post peak oil reality. These include, but are not limited to-

1) Death. This is self explanatory.

2) Taxes. Any organization, "legitimate" government or not, which still commands the resources of warfare within its jurisdiction will have the ability to levy taxes upon the populace within said jurisdiction. One cannot hope that there will be no such organizations, as humans are by nature gregarious, orderly animals. (Which up until now, has been a great contributor to our success as a species.) Like as not, you will be at the bottom of that organization, as most of us are in life now. The only way to gain freedom from such an organization will be to control it.

3) Commerce. So long as there are living people, there will be someone who desires what another person has, but be unable to confiscate it by force of arms alone. Whether it's cords of firewood or wondering how many of your children will eat per person that your wife prostitutes herself to, people will always be buying and selling. Don't think that this will be reality for many people? Food and a roof over your head have to come from somewhere, and when no one can get a job, how else are people unwilling to rob, often already without many resources, going to obtain wealth?

With an eye to these truths, the potential comprehensive peak oil business plan was formed.

First, one must cover startup capital. I leave this problem to you, and to whatever wiles which you may posess. Suffice to say that you must do what is neccesary to preserve your survival.

Secondly, one must bring to the table a concrete business model. I would suggest landscaping. You will first need a tow vehicle to transport your mowers. Use an early to mid 80's Ford F-350. Do NOT use a vehicle which was made after '86. Models after this year where equipped with electronic fuel injection, which will make the rebuild more expensive and hamper our efforts later. These trucks can be bought for a song, if you do a little smart shopping, and have the good Dana 60 front end, not the dana 50 ttb. Select a model with the 351W(5.8L) or 460(7.5L) gas engines. Rebuild the motor, trans, suspension and axles to stock specs. This can be done for much cheaper than you may think, and you will have an iron reliable truck that will be basically new mechanically. 2 or 4 wheel drive is up to your discretion. Jet the carb larger to run alcohol. Have a second carb jetted for regular gas, and if you desire, a third for something in the middle. Run all stainless steel fuel lines to avoid corrosion. You can now run variable fuels in your truck with a simple carb swap. Second, you will need mowers. Use the kind with attached grass collecting bags. (Astute readers will see where I am going). Collect all grass, tree and bush clippings. These can all be fermented into ethanol.
I would suggest constructing the equivelant of enormous solar cookers for the distillation process, for a minimum of energy input required. You may ask, why did I choose the dead-duck solution of ethanol over waste vegetable oil and a diesel engine, available at any Wendy's or McDonalds? (the oil, not the engine. "Hi, I'd like a Big MACK, all your used fry oil,, and a handjob?") I believe that the next stage of the attempt to fill the energy deficit after people grow weary of competing with oil companies for food will be a push to use WVO to allow our transportation industry to keep limping along a little bit longer. I also predict a nationwide liposuction campaign so that fat people can make candles and soap to wash their asses when the power goes out. Also, you require less external input with alcohol, as you do not depend on fast food shitholes remaining solvent. It is up to you whetther or not to pay taxes on the fuel you have created, but I will submit that as a prisoner, you will be nothing more than a member of the slave labor pool.

Approach a suburban HOA with a bid to do their landscaping. You want a suburb of a fairly large city. Ensure that this is the variety of HOA that also does outside maintainence on the houses themselves. (Roofing, siding, etc.) Ruthlessly undercut your competitors, even at a loss to yourself, secure in the knowledge that you will pay a pittance for your fuel. No HOA can resist an ultra-low bid and some good old fashioned bribery. Run all vehicles and mowers on as much of your home-brew fuel as possible. Hire employees as neccesary.

Next, submit a bid to handle the outside maintainance of the houses. With yet another ultra-low bid and some more bribery, you should get your contract. Save ALL materials removed form houses! (shingles, nails, etc.) If you have a large HOA to work with, or can eventually get one in your pocket, this can add up to quite a bit of money and material.

Continue with this business model until you have removed all competition in your area. Don't have pity for them; run those motherfuckers right the hell out of business.

By now you should have all the HOAs and much of City Hall in your pocket, as the sort of smarmy prick that heads HOAs can frequently be found in the echelons of local government.

POP!!! Was that the housing bubble I heard? Wait, people are losing their homes because of runaway inflation and interest rates?

Good.

With the local influence you have, you should be able to leverage enough debt to start buying suburban homes at distress sale prices. Or, you can simply bribe enough politicians to have them "eminent domained" right on out of your way. This requires timing- you must buy early enough in the collapse that one can still get loans, but late enough that propery taxes and loan payments will not crush you.

Sell land only if you need to, and only to get money to pay taxes or loans. Buy as much land as you can.

Whoopsie! You mean that there is not enough transportation fuel to ship food from Buttfuck, Nebraska to Chicago, Illinois?
Well, we will just have to farm closer to the cities (the only places still generating wealth).

This is where you come in. Take all those dispossed farmers (remember those prisoners we talked about, that you don't want to join? Yeah, they are the ones working the now state owned and bankrupt farms, now that there is only enough oil to make fertilizer, but not to run the tractors.), and sharecrop the shit out of them. Put the homeless suburbanites to work on your farms. Pay them in food and living space. Sell your food to the folks in the cities. Demolish the houses and save all the refuse, either as metal to sell for scrap(Whoops! You mean that skyrocketing transportation costs, declining recources, and general economic chaos have caused metal prices to skyrocket? Oh golly gee.), wood to turn into ethanol or firewood (Whoops! Freezing city people cut down all the trees!), or shingles for their tar content.

Remember all that shit you saved up in your salad days? This comes in handy now.

Or, you can save the metal.... particularly brass and copper...

At this point, you will wish to sell the tar from the shingles to the city or their contractors to patch the relentlessly decaying roads.
You will have bought a lot of land and homes by now. Also buy any machine shops, foundries, and related equipment you can get ahold of.

If you have done your job right, you will control all of the cities food supply, possibly much of its water supply, most of its metal supply, a fair amount of its industry (you will be selling Franklin stoves like a motherfucker) and most of its politicians. The Federal government will likely have collapsed due to lack of monetary support from the states and their populations.

But what to do with all those dead bodies from the city? Well, with the random farming equipment you have, along with most of the fuel in the area, you should make a fairly efficiant disposal service. Build a plant to process the cadavers into soap and fertilizer. Use wood ashes to obtain lye for the soap. But wait! All that human waste in the cities with no place to go now would make a great fertilizer!

You are now your cities sanitation department.

Use the machine shops and foundries you bought earlier to crank out shell casings, primers, and bullets. Melt down the steel and iron you saved to make firearms. Obtain powder through trade, or by purchasing production for the materials of black powder. After all, your little feudal hamlet needs defense, doesn't it? This is only if you cannot obtain control of other arms and ammo, as you likely will be able to. It can also be used to supplement your store of weapons.

You now control the cities ammunition supply. From this point, it would be easy to oust the local government and install yourself as dictator. There will be four classes in your society- a thinking class, a production class, and a farming class.

I somehow doubt that I would be a member of the thinking class.

Keep in mind that this is basically how human societies worked, before the era of cheap energy, i.e. mechanical slaves. If this sounds any more ruthless that what your neighbor would be happy to do, read a history book.

From this point, you can choose whether you wish to be a peaceful ruler, or a brutal tyrant whose sole objective is to gain territory, water, and eventually hunt down some leftover nuclear weapons and people who know how to arm them, with which to threaten neighboring communities.

And there you have it- The comprehensive Peak Oil Business Plan!
From humble groundskeeper to nuclear terrorist in 10 easy steps. You can rest easy, knowing that your future is assured.

[DavidFolks]

Well Mr. Swift, I can't argue with your logic. I would suggest you set up in a largely Catholic community to ensure a steady supply of energy, and in the end, raw materials.

I've lately been wondering, however, if a case might be made for letting our societal fear and greed work to our advantage.

With steadily increasing costs for fuel, you could develop a human powered vehicle that is not too dissimilar in function to a car. If, for instance, it was totally enclosed, to keep out the weather, reasonably easy to operate, and a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper to purchase, you could conceivably capture a very large market share.

You'd get the people who could afford the car, but not the ancillary fuel, maintenance, insurance and licensing costs. You'd get the enviro-nuts trying to make a point. You'd get the people who wanted to get on board with the next new thing, and you might even get thoughtful people whose considered opinion showed them that personal transport doesn't need to have all the costs currently associated with it.

Would this be making money on backs of the poor? Sure it would. But one could argue that the poorest in any society are the base supporting the balance of the populace.

Get the bicycle lobby to support your effort and campaign for better infrastructure. Better yet, get them to lobby for equal rights to the roads and existing infrastructure. Sell the production off to a large manufacturer, and let them saturate the market. You can take the money and sink it into your next venture.

Make your prototype electric car. Never mind trying to electrify a Hummer, it's a waste of time and energy. Now that there are a bunch of little HPV's running around on the streets, people are going to be a lot more accepting of an electric vehicle that's smaller and lighter than a standard SUV. This solves some of the stored energy requirement problems, and makes the thing easier to engineer, and cheaper to build. Make sure it looks sexy though, it still has to sell.

By now fuel prices are so high, car manufacturers can't give away their cars. Offer the manufactuing rights, and watch the feeding frenzy. In a bid to remain solvent, production will be fast tracked.

Now you have the auto union on your side. Their muscle will prove invaluable in influencing government. Have them lobby for battery research, fast-charging stations, plug and play battery packs, and so on.

By now the grid is going to be under severe strain, as it has to provide electricity for heating, where communities once relied on natural gas. Now is the time to use your auto lobby to push for small scale local electric generation at a community level.

Drop a hint that there is a lot of energy stored in human waste, that currently costs money to get rid of.

Use the money you got from the big three to build a waste processing plant near a growing community. Set up so that it's easy to divert the waste stream into your plant. Make sure to use photovoltaics and windmills to provide your operating energy. The energy infrastructure for your plant should be sufficient to provide energy to the community it serves. Sell electricity to the municipality at discount to current grid supply. Buy out the grid infrastructure and pay to put in a bypass.

Make sure you charge the municipality for the sewage and garbage collection service, but undercut the companies that collect and pay to dump, by about 5%.

Encourage the community to get garbage disposal systems, subsidize them if you must. Make sure the community is encouraged to grind up all organic wastes and add them to the sewage stream. Tell them that they'll be charged per bag of garbage, but there will be no charge for recyleables. This should encourage people to lobby manufacturers to use packaging that is recycleable.

From the sewer lines, separate the solids from the waste, and digest them anaerobically in a sealed environment. Tap the methane, and use it to run steam turbines. Sell this electricity to the community when the sun isn't shining, and the wind isn't blowing. Run condensing lines through the community, and sell the process heat. Encourage housing that requires less energy to heat and cool.

Use some of your process heat to distill the waste water, and return it to the environment clean and pathogen free. Use some of the heat to sterilize the processed solids, and sell as fertilizer to the agricultural sector. They are sure to need a supply to replace the petroleum derived stuff they've been using for years.

Separate all the recycleables and sell them to industry.

Can you incinerate the rest, and scrub the emmissions? Add that heat to your steam turbines.

Hopefully, the test community becomes an example to follow. If it doesn't, who cares? You'll have lived high off the hog, enjoyed an income far in excess of what you could ever spend, and left a legacy for your kids.

Never did want to be a nuclear terrorist, and too lazy to be a landscaper.