Freeconomy Blog
Tue
25 Mar
Peak Oil and why it’s not reported…and Stage 2 of Freeconomy
| 9 comments |
Before I start I should point out that we may have a problem with our member’s Freeconomy emails getting into the inboxes of those they contact. This is for a variety of reasons which I have outlined on our Testimonial page – please take a read of it as it will improve the service for everyone with very little effort from you all as individuals. Anything we can do on that score we obviously will.
If you read my last blog you may have picked up on the fact that ’Peak Oil’ is very high up on my agenda. It is not that I am worried about it at all. I believe if we embrace it life will be a lot better for all the species on this planet, ourselves included. However if we don’t prepare for it, and we only have about 7-15 years to prepare, then we could be looking at not just an economic collapse but a real humanitarian crises.
For those of you to whom the phrase ‘Peak Oil’ is new, you may be wondering why it could involve a humanitarian crisis. Oil is the blood of our economy. It transports most people to work. It is used in pesticides and synthetic fertilisers on over 95% of the world’s food, as shocking as that sounds. It transports your bananas from the Dominican Republic and your Basmati rice from India. It was used to build the factory that made your television and even your solar panel, if you have either. This computer I am typing on is made of oil-based plastics from a factory dependent on black gold. The minerals used to make photo-voltaic are quite rare and need to be mined using trucks run on the stuff. Take a look around the room you read this in. Almost everything, if not everything, got there using oil in some way.
However oil is not an infinite resource, though the CEO’s of Shell and Esso would like you to think it was, so by definition it has to run out sometime. It began to form at a specific time, around 90 million years ago. In the last 100 years, we have already exhausted 1 trillion of the 2 trillion predicted barrels of oil that WILL EVER be discovered on this planet, and those are the most optimistic figures. And given that we have picked the best fruit first, there isn’t a lot of the good stuff left. The real problem is that once the price of oil rises – as it will as supply decreases over the next 3 years and the fact that China and India now want to copy our consumerist lifestyles – then less people are going to be able to afford it. Once that happens, the economies of scale of producing it are going to significantly reduce, and the oil companies won’t have the same capability of investing in the infrastructure to dig for it. And once the shareholders of these companies understand this, they will rapidly invest in other areas (which will fall later due to the crash in the oil industry) and the problem for the oil corporations will perpetuate itself quicker than you can say ‘Bomb Iran!’.
Which is why I believe the media, including the BBC, are not reporting on it. As I said in my last blog, my comments on peak oil were edited out of every pre-recorded BBC Interview I have done, and certainly didn’t make it into the Daily Star’s article. Their business, like all others, depends on oil, and those at the top and throughout have rather big salaries and mortgages to pay off, which is fair enough. Their fear is that if they report on Peak Oil now, they will bring forward the inevitable by a few years as consumer confidence will decline, shareholders will pull money away from the oil industry and the whole thing will unravel a few years earlier than it inevitably will anyway.
So maybe they are right not to then, you may ask! The problem is, because our societies are so dependent on oil, it will take at least 10-15 years to put an infrastructure in place to deal with it. But if the media, our governments and the corporations don’t have the courage to face up to the issue until three or four years before the shit hits the compost toilet, then we are in big trouble. And I can tell you global warming will be the least of our problems – if we can’t even eat, the production of carbon will decrease dramatically and climate change will look after itself!
This is where things like The Freeconomy Community, Transition Towns, Freecycle and local, grassroots projects such as G.R.O.F.U.N are so important. Not only do they provide us all with the skills to be able to embrace the impending situation, they also build closer, more resilient, communities. People who know each other are more likely to help each other when the inevitable happens.
And you never know, it may just be the best thing to ever happen to us. Personally, I will be making the steps over the next 5 years in my own personal life to deal with it, whilst working through The Freeconomy Community and other local projects to help other people make the same transition. And in the process, lets all have a great time, what is the point of all this if it isn’t to enjoy the experience – we shouldn’t take it all too seriously!
Tonight I am off to meet up with the local freeconomy group in Bristol who have organised a freeconomy community yoga class, which my body is saying it needs. I have a lot of freeconomy community projects I want to test and refine here over the next 6 months, and so am looking forward to meeting the folks here tonight to have a bit of a brainstorm afterwards.
Stage 2 of freeconomy, for me, is getting people to meet in groups in order to put faces on names, and hence start tackling the most common problem that members are having – that they are actually afraid to ask for help - which I should add is the polar opposite of what people said the problem would be when I set it up!
I’ll keep you posted on my ideas and would love you all to feed into it. I certainly don’t have all the answers, or even any, so the more heads the better on this one.
You can leave a comment here, email me on Saoirse@justfortheloveofit.org or phone 0775 886 1783 if you have any suggestions on how to bring Stage 2 about. Myself and the team are currently working a model which will be used to bring it from its current stage to Stage 5, which I am sure many will see as ‘idealistic’ at this stage of humanity, so I’ll keep it to myself for now! It may be more realistic when the media start reporting the truth.
If you want to find out why the BBC refuse to report on Peak Oil anymore, then contact them by clicking here
Comment on this Post:
Isiah comments ...
So it’s a conspiracy now?
How long before you start ranting about how the Joos control the media?
Pass comments ...
I loved the idea of the walk, hardship was obvious, but i was shocked like most that u stopped at france, then walking around england, i was like, \"yeah man!\", then you stopped that, fair enough, i wouldnt of done those things, now your home, in your ’Bubble’ surrounded by people that will say yes and agree because they too are in the same homey bubble.
I want the world to change and everyone takes small steps, i dont buy Nestle products, im not standing in front of tanks but thats my little thing, saying oil companies are evil is a obvious truth, your stating nothing new here. I love the ’Lets come together’ stuff and im all for it, stop the oil companies, save the whale, free the world!
I’m gonna stop reading this blog now, cuz i know the world needs to change, and if this blog is just preaching a message that the world needs to change, i already knew that. ’The Inevitble Truth’ is a great film, you should preach about that. Or show pictures of polar bears on thin ice. I wanted to see your journey from our fair land to India, then i enjoyed reading about your journeys around the country, but now, your just another freecomonist saying the world needs to change.
I hope you find peace and whatever it is you feel will make you whole.
BBC conspiracy comments ...
I dont know why the bbc didnt want to include your statements on Peak Oil in their pieces on you, maybe it didnt fit into their story, but the idea of a conspiracy seems a bit daft. A 2 minute search on google ’bbc peak oil’ and you can find lots of articles on it by the bbc.
Saoirse comments ...
In response to the last post (BBC conspiracy) -
1. If you dig deeper and check out the dates of anything the BBC has done on Peak Oil (which is a handful of items anyway) in the past, you will see that apart from an interview in Nov 2007 with Jeremy Leggett, the rest is all dated between 2004 and 2006. Given that it is probably the biggest issue facing humanity in the future, I find that very odd indeed.
2. The word ’conspiracy’ is very loaded and I’ve never used it in relation to this. All I am saying is that they’ve taken a decision not to report on it. I am not a ’conspiracy theorist’, I just realise that the media organisations have their own agenda and you have to be even more naive than me to think that decisions aren’t made at the board level of these corporations that are designed to protect their own interests.
3. I don’t want to just target the BBC here - they are the best of all the media corporations. But it is important that they uphold their integrity as if they don’t we’ll have lost a beacon of good reporting.
All I am saying - and I speak from experience and from having spoke off-the-record with a number of journalists from a variety of media corporations - is that Peak Oil has gotten about 5% of the column and air space that it deserves, and most of that is pre-2006.
I also hope this doesn’t come across as negative - the only reason I am writing about it is that if people don’t know about it, how can they properly prepare for the future. I think we all have a responsibility to inform each other of things that are going to affect our future and that of our children.
C T Campbell comments ...
I don’t see it as being negative at all. You are making people aware of something that is going to really impact their lives very very soon. If we tackle the issue of peak oil now, all in our own local areas, then we’ll encounter what I call a soft landing in a few years time. How far away the crisis is I’m still not sure though I reckon you may be within the right range, depends on who you listen to I suppose.
So I think you are being extremely responsible in doing so. But most people won’t believe you until it’s too late. You know why - because life is too comfortable right now for us all, and change is always resisted.
My advice is to keep highlighting the issue as much you can for now and get the skills and land you’ll need for when it happens. Those who don’t believe you now will be then asking to come and live with you in 10/15/20 years. I hope I am still around to help them, as the knowledge of the old is dying off and I am an endangered species.
Transition Towner - UK comments ...
I agree wholeheartedly.
Would just like to feed something in myself. If we don’t all start using less oil, then the next war in the middle east and beyond will be inevitable.
So lets face it - either we use less of it or we all have some blood on our hands. The choice is yours in this choice-rich society. What are you going to choose?
I’m choosing a bicycle, but maybe not the spandex pants.
eric the fool comments ...
nothing wrong with spandex, especially if its green and all over in a cat suit stylie ;0)
Gasparo Contarini comments ...
The real issue surrounding peak oil is the impending Iranian Oil Bourse, which has the potential to bring the US dollar to an end.
Would you care to comment on this and suggest how we counteract this?
