Oil crisis ahead? ‘Peakniks’ build for future

If the day comes that oil grows so scarce that Austinites can’t afford fruit hauled in from California and brownouts roll across Texas, Lester Germanio will live high, wide and cool in his West Lake Hills villa.

Germanio and other Austinites who have banded together to trade information and survival tips are preparing themselves for what they see as inevitable deprivations as oil production declines past its peak. Some call them “Peakniks.”


Germanio’s half-finished, 2,800-square-foot limestone home, called FoodWaterShelter, clings to a hillside off Terrace Mountain Drive. When completed, it will be powered largely by solar panels, provide all his water needs out of a 40,000-gallon cistern that will be filled by rainwater, cool him with old-fashioned ventilation and shade, and feed him from greenhouse gardens fertilized with fish droppings.

“The only way to beat them is not to need them,” Germanio, a 55-year-old architectural engineer, said of the oil and other fuels that he blames for what he calls resource wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

His maneuvers are more sophisticated than duck-and-cover, but the anxiety is not dissimilar: As the anticipated peak oil crisis unfolds, Peakniks foresee a period in which the U.S. would devolve into the stone age. The economy would tumble; cars, even hybrids, would be useless; day-to-day goods would be hard to come by.

Recently, the peak oil movement got a shot of legitimacy from an unlikely source: the head of Royal Dutch Shell.

In an e-mail to employees picked up last month by the Oil Drum, an online forum, Jeroen van der Veer, the chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, wrote, “Shell estimates that after 2015, supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand.”

The Austin American-Statesman (Texas)