It’s not exactly a secret that natural resources are running low. It’s never in the news is probably because no-one cares, how many people want to know that they wont be able to get any petrol in a couple of decades (max) when they could be finding out about dirty secrets of celebs and politicians!

Meh, we’ll just wind up switching to nuclear power in about ten years and then run everything we can off of electricity.

Then when the uranium is gone and large portions of our country’s are occupied by untouchable power stations, we will eventually realise that we are quite screwed.

On the bright side impending doom does wonders for research.

Ahhhh Hubbert’s peak. Have read extensively on the subject and follow the markets daily. A bit scary to think about especially with a billion people in China and thier demand growing at about a 30% clip each year. If anyone is interested Kenneth S. Deffeyes has written a couple books on the subject, I just finished reading Beyond Oil, some very technical reading but well worth it.

rest assured that we’ll die naturally before any adequate action is taken toward a positive, green future.

“only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we can’t eat money.”
– cree proverb.

A special issue of Scientific American, Crossroads for planet Earth just hit the stands and I am starting to wade through it.  It’s a broad-spectrum, comprehensive look at this and many other resource and population issues.

Yes, we are going to run out of oil and natural gas sooner rather than later. 

Will we really go all nuclear powered electric?  Don’t know. 

However, I am thinking that someway, somehow when the human condition forces the human population to get creative… we will produce alternatives to meet our needs. 

Now how soon?  How many suffer in the process?  How GREEN friendly will some of those alternatives be along the path of our planet’s and this species’ survival?  I dunno.

Recommended reading

James Howard Kunstler:

Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape

Home from Nowhere: Remaking our everyday world for the 21st Century

and

The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century

and visit his blog at…

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/

It’s called, appropriately, Clusterfuck Nation.

I have been reading about peak oil for the last couple of years.  Of course, reaching the Hubbert Peak (if we haven’t already), doesn’t mean the oil is gone, just that it becomes more and more scarce and expensive.  The thing to keep in mind about petroleum is that it is not just for energy.  There is a wide range of uses in everyday life from synthetic textiles to plastics to tar for roads.  The biggest hit that industrialized nations will take is certainly on the “cheap energy” front.  From what I have read, none of the alternative fuels that we are working with is anywhere near ready to fully supply our energy demands, let alone at the same or nearly same cost.  Many of the studies on nuclear energy don’t even bother to add in the costs of constructing a nuclear plant- they just use operational cost figures!  All of these issues won’t affect just the US, but any “modern” industrialized nation- Japan, the European nations, Australia, Canada, China, etc… Those least affected will be the traditional hunting/gathering societies, then the subsistence farmers, and finally the other mostly agrarian societies.  While this does mean the end of our current lifestyles, it is not all bad.  It certainly won’t mean the end of mankind (unless the fools in power or terrorists start launching nuclear warheads) and it takes about 5o years for greenhouse gases to begin equalizing, so that’s “good” from a global warming standpoint.  Should be an interesting century.

I am of the belief that all the alternatives we need for petroleum have already been developed, but there’s just too many important people making too much money in petroleum, and pressure to stick with fossil fuels. (I like a good conspiracy… they can cure HIV and cancer too, I’ll bet, if you can pay)

I remember seeing a story about mountains of used tires, some of them burning out of control, and how they pollute the enviornment when there are really so many good uses for them. The biggest one was as an aggregate in asphalt. Seems if you grind up old tires and mix them into the blacktop for a highway, that highway will last many many years more without a single pothole, and the rubber from the tires makes the road quieter to drive on, and less abrasive, saving your car’s tires. But, we cant have all those road laborers out of work, we cant have all the asphalt companies sitting around waiting decades for a road to need patching, and who’ll need all the tar it takes to make a road if the road lasts so long… petroleum not being used at alarming rates? Can’t have that.

The world is SO not driven by what the public really needs. It’s driven by what the wallets of those in charge really need.

ND

Now might be a reeeeally good time for everyone to learn how to grow their own vegetables and get a bicycle.

Inspiration:  it never hurts to read “Walden” (Henry David Thoreau) again.  Another more recent book is “Better Off:  Flipping the Switch on Technology” by Eric Brende.  Brende is an MIT graduate; some of what he writes you have to take with a grain of salt, usually when he’s playing amateur psychologist/sociologist and draws some bemusing conclusions, but otherwise his book makes for a good read.

I haven’t turned into a tree-huggin’ hippie living in a log cabin, but since reading those two books I’ve made some lifestyle changes and found I am just as happy (if not happier) doing with less. 

I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but I really think part of the problem is we are just not used to thinking where things like food, power, fuel, clothing, etc. come from beyond the obvious answers like “farm”, “power plant”, “factory”, and where they end up when we’re through with them.  As long as we can get what we want (or think we want) when we want it, and as long as we don’t have to think about it when it’s gone, who cares about the toll on the environment, the political impact, or the social impact? 

I agree with NurseDaddy ... if someone discovered the cure for AIDS, and let’s say it was something inanely simple and cheap, the drug companies who make the drug cocktails and such would go apeshit and suppress it--all driven by a lust for money and materialism.

Sorry to ramble so.

--Joe

(offtopic)If you go to Kunstler’s site, be sure to see the Eyesore of the month - very entertaining.

I doubt that drug companies could suppress a cheap cure for AIDS.  More likely curing AIDS is a devilishly complicated problem and they have not solved it yet.  They’re happy to profit from it and they may have execs who are that evil, but the likelihood of keeping any secret is divided by the number of people who know it.  All it would take is one blogging research assistant.(/offtopic)

As for going back to a log cabin and raising our own food, forget it.  The agrarian model supported a billion or two people in constant danger of starvation and disease.  The industrial model has been supporting 6+ bn people, some in similar danger.  Suppose the world’s economy goes south, the industrial model fails, and you own 40 acres and a mule.  You build a cabin and raise your own food.  Starving people will just leave you alone?

Better we focus our efforts on a good transition through the bottleneck.

Some shorter term thoughts on oil. (1) I recall reading that the alternative fuels don’t become economically feasible until oil reaches about $70 per barrel, which we are approaching. (If I don’t take too long with this post.) (2) In constant $s, oil gasoline prices haven’t reached the levels that we saw in the oil shocks of 70s and early 80s. Nor have we seen any of the inflation of that era. (3) Our behavior vis-avis did change as a result of that period of shortages, overall consumption went down.

A special issue of Scientific American, Crossroads for planet Earth just hit the stands and I am starting to wade through it.  It’s a broad-spectrum, comprehensive look at this and many other resource and population issues.

I’ll have to check that out. (As if my worry closet isn’t full enough.)

Water is one of the things that doesn’t receive a lot of MSM attention in this country. Fortune Magazine contends that, as a business opportunity, water will be the oil of the 21^st century. Last February CBC News ran a special called Water for profit how multinationals are taking control of a public resource.

I doubt that drug companies could suppress a cheap cure for AIDS.

I was just being facetious here.

As for going back to a log cabin and raising our own food, forget it ... Starving people will just leave you alone?

I meant everyone should consider being more self-sufficient.  Obviously this isn’t going to happen, so if the infrastructure collapsed and it was just little ol’ me was living happily in my log cabin, I guess I’d either be murdered for my food or I’d have to get me a rifle.  And since I’m not keen on getting a rifle, I guess I’ll just have to die.  Or pull a Zardoz and bliss out behind the periphery shield of Vortex Four while the starving masses watched from the other side. 

--Joe

Friggin’ optimists.

I’ve been watching this for several years, and thinking my own private thoughts about what might happen.

The best models I can see aren’t the friendly, blithe, “Well, we’ll just do something else, won’t we, old chaps? Carry on, no worries! The soaring human spirit and all, what what?�?

They’re the models of Easter Island, and the 1954 Tom Godwin story “The Cold Equations.” The ones where there are, hidden in the mist of optimism, certain irresistible forces, impenetrable walls, undeniable facts.

I think you’re right to be worried, and I think you wouldn’t have even asked the question if you didn’t feel, deep down, that there was some part of all this that doesn’t make sense.

Here’s what I think you know: Somewhere in your head there’s a graph with the rising line of population and standard of living, and the falling line of oil energy. At some point, they have to cross. And since the first one is BASED on the second one, the second one has to start downward at that intersection. Fast enough, perhaps, to crash before it can be stopped.

Yes, yes, the rest of you. Happy, happy us, we’ll go nuclear, or burn biodiesel, or use waves and wind. Electric cars! Clean solar energy! Something will turn up, what what? (If nothing else, “God will provide!�? Argh.)

But ... it appears to me that it won’t. The reason we use petroleum is that it’s a LOT cheaper than the next closest thing. There really is nothing on the horizon, it seems to me, that will replace it. Nothing as cheap, as transportable, as available in the short term.

Windmills cost MONEY. Solar cells are EXPENSIVE. Biofuels require FARMLAND and FERTILIZER ... which is already maxed out with feeding (incompletely) the 6 billion. And on and on.

And they all have environmental side effects. Scale up windmills, or dams, or solar collectors, or wave power, or nuke plants, to the point that they can service the needs of 6 billion people, and you probably have just another catastrophe on your hands.

I lived in a winter resort town in California, some years back. Three or four times over my 22 years there, the road into town snowed in for four days. Here’s what you see if you go into a supermarket on Day 3: No produce, no dairy products, no meats, and no bread. None. Zero.

Here’s what I learned from that: If the trucks stop rolling, the revolution starts on Day 4. No, none of us killed each other over bread. But we were already tough mountain people, and we knew the trucks would come back soon enough. And none of us lacked for heat.

But the thought of the once-upon-a-time civilization on Easter Island, those poor bastards who managed to maroon themselves there and then used up the resources so that they couldn’t survive there, but also couldn’t leave, has haunted me since that time. We’re stuck here. There’s not going to be enough to keep us all alive, much less happily supplied with video games and cross trainers. The day we wake up and start realizing that, that hypothetical Day 4, scares me A LOT.

There’s a lot more than I want to go into here, but ... what I see is this: Bad stuff. Fear. The end of freedom. Billions of people dying. 

The decisions could still be made to save large numbers of us, and to keep our planet going too, but ... we have a president here in the United States who is the most powerful luddite the world has ever seen. The most proudly advertised fact of his existence is that he was able to start up a killing machine – which has cost just shy of $200 billion dollars so far. He has lived in the lap of luxury and wealth and power all his life, and he is probably unable even to understand suffering in others. Put him in the same room with Science and he suddenly has appointments elsewhere. Present him with disaster and he freezes up.

Not all of this is going to be played out in terms of energy.

A lot of it is going to appear as apparently-unconnected manifestations of fear. I actually think the uprising of fundamentalist religion in the world – especially in the United States – may be a connected factor, and if so, I expect a lot more of it. It’s a form of low-grade panic, where people begin to have a sense that they have no control over their lives, and they look for reassurance in the words and commandments of traditional authority figures. (The power that was handed to that Christian boob Bush may be a direct side-effect here, and if so, things may get even worse politically, as we huddle under the protection of jut-jawed but stupid strongmen all over the world.)

Some of it will play out in terms of public health. If the east coast, doesn’t have enough natural gas for heat some winter, a LOT of people suddenly become the cold, immunologically-weakened beachhead for a platoon of aggressive new strains of flu. Those who can, go south to stay with relatives, and bring it with them. Or if we can suddenly no longer afford to get HIV drugs or doctors to Africa, an even bigger beachhead develops there, and trendy new diseases stow away on planes bound for Europe, Asia, North America, Australia.

I’ll stop here.

Okay, having said all this, I know that usually when someone states an apparently hopeless outlook, we all rise up and say “Okay, Mr. Doom and Gloom! If you’re so convinced that all this bad stuff is going to happen, then what do YOU think we should do about it?�?

The answer is: Beats the shit out of me.

But then, I’m a “pessimist.�? I just have to be wrong.

Don’t I?

Gee Hank. That was a thought-provoking post.

I’m saddened by the fact that these types of scenarios will likely happen in my 3 1/2 year old’s lifetime. Poor boy. Poor innocent boy. I remember sitting in the back seat of my mom’s ‘68 Olds land yacht, wondering what odd and even meant, and why we were sitting in a long line blocks away from the gas station. But nobody ever said we’d run out.

There is so much wrong with the way things are going, and so little the average citizen can do about it. There are so few people who take the time to hang up their cell phones, park their DVD mind numbing system equipped SUV, turn off the constant barrage of advertisments, and give any of it any thought. And some of those that do look for ways to profit from it. Remember when all the lights went out that afternoon in August? There was one local gas station owner who had his pumps running; he had a generator keeping him in business. So he jacked his gas prices upwards of 4 bucks a gallon because he was the only station open for miles around. Many people do not go there anymore because of what he did, even if it means that they have to drive a few miles further to fill up. He’d be the one to kill you over a loaf of bread, I’d bet.

Sad. Really friggin sad. :-(

ND

Hank Fox,

I’mn only going to rise up and agree with you. I’ve been researching Peak Oil for some time now and I lost track of how many papers on the subject I’ve read. No alternative energy source or combination of sources is going to replace oil. We’re more or less screwed.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m stocking up on cheap clothing, 20 year shelf life foods and other essentials while I can.

Hank, the oil is not going to just pick a day and run out.  It will get scarce and more expensive, and when it does, people will start making money on conservation and alternatives.  Also, as oil becomes more expensive, demand will fall and people will change their consumption habits.

Even some oil companies see this coming and have begun to work on alternatives.  The nation of Dubai is preparing for the post-oil economy too.  Smart A-rabbs; they’re thinking ahead.

Imagine you were in the photographic film industry.  You could be like Agfa and go broke, or you could be like Kodak and go digital.  Do it too soon and you go broke; do it too late and you go broke.  Same idea - not the soaring human spirit but the almighty buck.

Cause for worry?  Sure; ask the tens of thousands of out-of-work Kodak film-division employees.  Similar disruption throughout the economy, whith some rather agonizing brown stuff hitting the fan.

I agree things are going to get bad and a lot of people will die.  Probably not billions of people.  Odds the US will still be #1 when things open back up again, close to zero.  A pity, didn’t have to be that way.  Credit the Shrub.

Occasionally I hear someone worrying about the human race going extinct.  NOT likely.  I do worry about my kids and grandkids though.

Water is one of the things that doesn’t receive a lot of MSM attention in this country. Fortune Magazine contends that, as a business opportunity, water will be the oil of the 21^st century. Last February CBC News ran a special called Water for profit how multinationals are taking control of a public resource.

The sooner that market forces “take control of a public resource”, the sooner that appropriate price signals from the market can encourage conservation. Things which are scarce should cost more. China has virtually free water and power—not coincidentally, China is exceptionally wasteful of these resources. Per unit of energy, the U.S. is five times more productive than China. We do more with less, in part because we have to buy most of our resources at market prices.

Let me preface this with the fact that for the first time in my life, I feel like I am wearing a tinfoil hat.

That being said, after reading more and more on peak oil and the current state of politics around the world from sites such as fromthewilderness.com, dieoff.org, lifeaftertheoilcrash.net, etc, the more I am starting to think that things here in the us (and around the world) are going to get very bad, very quickly.

I would like to think that this will not take place overnight (e.g. prices will rise over time), but if our greedy leaders decide to antagonize the rest of the modern world over the remaining oil supply, we could find ourselves cut off from trade with a worthless dollar almost overnight...and we no longer have the infrastructure to support ourselves.

This is probably too bleak of a picture for most people to wrap their heads around, and obviously one of the worst case scenarios...but a likely one in my mind with our current leadership.

Even if bush and company do not hose us all completely and we actually have 2-5 years, if everyone saw the big picture tomorrow we would still be hard pressed to support half of our population by then (speaking food here, not shelter, energy, etc).

Yes, some state this cannot happen for 15-30 years...but those stating such do not seem to have any evidence or numbers to base their claims off of while those stating doom and gloom in the near future do.

One thing that makes this even harsher than it would otherwise be is that there do not seem to be any good answers. At best, it seems like those who can prepare food wise and weather their environment might be ok...but that could just be my lack of faith in my fellow man shining through.

On an up note, it does look like there are groups working on making self sustaining communities out there and as mentioned above, one could just head out and start a homestead if one has the knowledge to do so.

Just from what I have been able to dig up in the last 24 hours, I have to say that I think Hank Fox is correct in this. I hope not, but I have always preferred facts and reason to hope...and all the facts and reason I have seen point to the worst coming sooner rather than later.

Well, I guess now that I have things a bit straighter in my head, all that is left is research and preparation. I will be more than happy to look the fool on this one, but in the mean time I am not going to hope things will just work out when the information out there states otherwise and I have a wife and two daughters to take care of (3yrs and 8mo).

And how to approach friends and family with this kind of news? “Gee mom, the world as we know it is going to end within a year or two...possibly as soon as a few months from now if Bush really screws things up...”

I guess maybe I will just send them all a copy of the end of suburbia and some links to websites and ask what they think...much else and they are going to think me stark raving mad.

I don’t expect many (if any) of them to believe this is coming, but it would be so much easier for a group of people to setup a small, sustainable community than it will be for individual people.

What a nightmare…

I’m with DOF on this one. I don’t think things are going to go to hell in a hand basket overnight, though I do think things are likely to get pretty bad for awhile until we get our heads out of the sand. I can’t help but think of the big panic and rampant doomsday scenarios that were flying all over the place about Y2K, and we all know how much of a non-event that ended up being.

Obviously not everyone is ignoring the problem and, as DOF pointed out, some folks are already planning ahead in anticipation that these problems will get worse in the not so distant future. After all there’s certain to be a good profit margin for anyone who manages to come up with a reasonable—or even semi-reasonable—alternative once the shit starts to really hit the fan.

Me and my father have been reading up on this ever since I was 12 and we have come to one inescapable conclusion on the destiny of mankind - if the oil crash doesn’t get us, the next super-virus will. Either way, at least 50% of the world’s population is going to die. Sure, it seems like a bleak estimate, but look at it this way: less people = less resources nessesary to spread among them.

I may be flowing in the same vein of pessemism as hank fox on this one, but this is how I see the near future playing out…

10-20 years: Gas and oil become more scarce and eventually dry up, provoking world war 3 over what little remains.

20-50 years: After the main civilization crash, its gonna be a ‘mad max’ society (use your imaginations).

50-100 years: If humanity is STILL alive after the long anarchy society (and the plagues that come with it), we’re gonna be down to about 3 billion people on the globe (and thats a GENEROUS estimate). By this time, all the oil on the planet is gone and so is most of the ammunition (since the factories that made them shut down and were raided 50 years ago), and hopefully, somewhere along the line, humanity will figure out some way to stop shoving their thumbs up their collective asses and figure out a way to cooperate and rebuild society from the ground up...hopefully a better society than this.

Yes, I am well aware i sound like a pessemistic prick by saying this, but to me, this just seems like the next logical step for humanity, given its current situation and the probability of a voluntary mass change.

Oh, and just on a side note, my Dad bet me dollars to donuts that China will emerge as the next ‘big power’ after the U.S, simply because they have sheer force of numbers (half the world’s population).

Anyway, thats just my $0.02. Your view on humanity’s future may vary.

All this ‘crash’ and ‘doomsday’ business seems, at least in the developed nations, to be a pretty rash estimate.

As said before, the decline of oil will be a gradual thing (that doesn’t make a few stock market panics impossible). New energies WILL be developed or developed ones will become commercially viable. Hydrogen HAS been proven to be a worthy option, but the infrastructure is devilishly complicated, more difficult to erect than the oil infrastructure (and oil-buring cars are simpler than hydrogen fuel-cars as well). So its only gonna be built once it really becomes necessary. Maybe we will have a decade or two where we all drive around in public transport or in small duel-efficient cars that still cost an arm and a leg to maintain. But things will go on.

As a small aside - while I concur that biofuels probably aren’t the solution (I heard that you’d have to plant half of Brazil - 50 % of ALL of Brazil! - with those crops to get 10% of the worlds demand, though I may get the figures wrong), growing biofuel use will not make the world go more hungry. We already HAVE enough food in this world. The poor sods in Africa just cannot afford it. Here in Europe we have a way too big agriculture output, and are paying/subsidizing farmers to leave fields fallow, and to destroy produce.

But back to the oil peak: I think the really dangerous result may be a showdown between industrial nations. Namely between the US and China. As said before in post above, China is going to need more and more oil, and its factories demand more and more ressources.

This may eventually lead to a reverse Pearl Harbor situation (taken to the extreme). China, much closer to most of the worlds oil and raw materials, may try to gain control of them - via economic or military means. The US, feeling itself threatened of being choked off (I can already hear the politicans: ‘The Chinese are stealing our oil! They are strangling the (remaining) US industry!). THAT could be the real flashpoint of the 21st century. And the more hard-hit by oil-shortages, the more desperate the players will be…

If we are lucky, all we will get are a few periods of deep economic depression. If we are not, a conflict between nuclear-armed nations.

I’ve always been of the mind that a shift of allegiance amongst the Saudis and/or OPEC towards the East, away from the West (or, worse, against just America, alone) would trigger a PeakOil-esque scenario.  It would have Depression Era changes to the US economy.

Today, however, we’ve managed to install an fail-safe against such a disaster.

In this new era, an alQaeda backed coup in Saudi Arabia would certainly trigger the scenario described by PeakOil.  Or, a few small nukes in key Persian Gulf ports would do the same.  These plausible events could trigger a PeakOil scenarion, but only if the US were unable to secure the Arabian Penn. oil fields as the chaos unfolded.  Fortunately, we now have the capability in this region to do so in a matter of days, with a degree of force not politically possible in the Iraq War.  While this would disrupt the amount of oil available on the wider open world market, America and her close allies would have enough energy to R&D ourselves out of this liability in a about decade.  And, motivated we would be.

American/Western ingenuity, spurred by a military timb-bomb, would hopefully rise to the challenge, if American’s have not become too soft and bitter.

Ingolfson, I haven’t studied up on hydrogen, but here’s what I think I know:

Oil comes out of the ground. The concentrated energy it represents was laid down millions of years ago, and it takes a tiny fraction of its energy to extract it.

Hydrogen comes from water. The water’s practically free, but to extract the hydrogen from it takes MORE energy than the extracted hydrogen contains.

In other words, and speaking loosely/metaphorically (I have no idea of the precise cost of oil or hydrogen extraction), to get a barrel of oil, you might have to spend 10 percent of it on extraction.

But to get a “barrel” of hydrogen, you’d have to spend TWO barrels of it—or more—on extraction. Which means all of the energy in hydrogen has to come from somewhere else.

Oil is a SOURCE of energy, hydrogen is an energy SINK. 

Hydrogen is only a form of energy transmission ... and the energy carried in it is obtained from some other source.

Think of hydrogen as a sort of pipeline that carries energy from one place to another, but it’s a very leaky pipeline that loses (due to the cost of extraction) well over half of the original energy.

Many future predictions, both optimistic and pessimistic, are based on the assumption that society must continue in its current form, with rampant consumerism, so-called creature comforts, willful ignorance, planned obsolescence, corporate greed, and a sense of empire and entitlement. 

In general, scientists and political experts have been warning over the years about this and that, and nobody pays them any heed (or the media won’t give them adequate coverage because it might depress too many viewers), and then when something awful happens ... “Oh, this is terrible?  How could this have happened?  Woe is us!  We’re so surprised.”

There is so much wrong with the way things are going, and so little the average citizen can do about it.

It’s not that there’s so little the average citizen can do about it; it’s that there’s so little the average citizen is willing to do about it.  I try to live green, I try to be aware of “the issues” and act accordingly, but also try to live and let live and not be one of those annoying people who preaches at everyone ("Why don’t you use cloth diapers?!  Don’t you know that potato chip bag will sit in a landfill for a hundred years?!")--maybe I should be a bit more outspoken.  But I think most people really don’t care, and I’ve done the Don Quixote thing enough--I guess I don’t care enough either.  It’s discouraging--esp after the last election.

“Oh...oh, gosh...you know, I’m not much on speeches, but it’s so gratifying to leave you wallowing in the mess you’ve made.  You’re screwed, thank you, bye.”

--Joe

Have those noting that this is unlikely to come even semi-soon (or be nearly as bad as it seems to me) taken a hard look at the information out there (including which information is based on numbers/studies and which information is not)?

I am not saying you are wrong, but am wondering if you could point me towards information that would lead to such conclusions as I am not finding it from anywhere other than places simply taking false information and basing their estimations on it.

I am not saying the world is ending, lets all freak out, but rather that it might be prudent to keep up on things and (if it seems rational to you) to try and take some preparative steps?

I realize it sounds crazy. I mean, here I sit in my McMansion out the the suburbs of north seattle with my wife and kids finishing up breakfast as I type this. Soon, I will be heading out to earn more money for rich people that pay themselves my yearly salary every 2 weeks. Not a ripple of unrest on the surface, no information pointing to anything so drastic coming as all of the brain dead media keeps telling people to “buy buy buy” and makes no mention that hard times might be not too far off.

Taken with this picture, this could not possibly be true. However, the utter silence pertaining to these things speaks quite loudly in my mind...though the most I can do is:
a) Start stocking up on foods
b) Start stocking up on books that might be needed
c) Finish paying off debt (almost there finally)
d) Sell our house
e) Attempt to get what will be needed to build a house that supplies its own energy and start a garden. (Amazingly, this can be done for less than I paid for the house we are in now...)

If things do not go south for a while, then I might be able to get all of this done in time.

If things do not go south at all, then I guess I will have plenty of canned and dried foods for a while, but be out nothing otherwise.

If things go south extremely soon, then at least I will not have to start out with people coming and trying to kick us out of our house or fighting over food.

Anywise, I will be quite glad if all the work coming is unnecessary...but even more glad if things really kick off fast and I am already a bit prepared for it.