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Thursday 28 October 2004

Welcome to the end of 4th Age - Petrolium [Shedir]

http://www.endofsuburbia.com/



If you get this DVD, by whatever means, and watch it your entire perception of civilisation as we know it will be transformed.
We're living in an age of unrivaled ease and prosperity. Perhaps not monetary, but in lifestyle it's never been cushier for a westerner.
The entire thing is built on oil, it's uses are never ending and the bad news is it's running out.
When this particular shit hits the fan we are truly fucked.
Globalisation will shift into reverse, better be prepared for electrical rationing and no personal car usage.
It's not scaremongering, this shit is about to happen and you've got to just accept it and try and figure out what you're going to do. For you, and your family.
It's bleak. We have to use nuclear and all forms of enviro friendly stuff to keep the electricity on and begin now.
Oils other uses will be much harder to duplicate:
  • Fertiliser
  • Pesticide
  • Plastics
  • Fuel

Read the site and spinoff links, find and watch the documentary. Digest it, get over the fear and panic.
Personally I'm going to start harassing my local MP to get it raised. The corporations will stop it all of course, but you have to try I guess.
Our frivilous disposable culture is coming to an end, but really it should never have been allowed in the first place. This use of a finite resouce should have been regulated when they first started worrying about it in the 60s.
I'm away to fishing, archery and agriculture lessons.

30 comments:

  1. I'd start with shooting lessons...
    What do you do? Best thing I can think of is to buy agricultural land. If the scaremongering is true, that's going to be the most valuable resource there is.

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  2. How do you defend your arable land? It goes back to farmers vs outlaws again. SlimRanch spends loads of effort on cattle, grain and tube veg. ShedSlayers arrive, kill you and keep the wimmenfolk. Decimate farm and move on.Law will die off as panic sets in.Our food mountains seem even more farcical now that a shortage may be coming, within our lifetimes.BandAid 4, Feed Your Self

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  3. I considered myself fairly well informed on the subject being a closet greenie but this documentary was a complete eye opener. Beyond the key issue of cheap energy running out, it's also fascinating to observe the historical formation of our suburban civilisation and the globalisation of our economy and the point that it was all based on cheap energy.The bottom line is that our oil hasn't exactly run out but we're pretty much at the point when global oil output peaks, then it drops. Yet demand is soaring and countries like the US are so heavily geared towards the cheap oil economy that the effect on them in particular be rapid and profound. This documentary is brilliant because it puts together the peices of what this is likely to mean. Chillingly they predict, and it sounds bang on to me, that the US will just vote in some maniacs that will promise they can keep their SUVs.Prices will rise dramatically and the impact upon our economy, jobs and the way we live, will be almost as dramatic as Stateside but we are perhaps, a little better placed to deal with it given we're already used to more expensive energy and we've got plenty of village-culture left over.Having these huge cities full of people who bargain stuff, push papers, sell things and otherwise do all sorts of kind of jobs which aren't involved in the direct making of good, manufacture of goods or essential service industries... that seems to be the most unsustainable aspect come the crash. This has been causing some ebate in #eed recently such as just what the hell is it that we can see ourselves doing for a job when the crash comes. It's not even that far off. I'm now getting worried about suddenly having my house worth bugger all, no job, no fecking industry and not having an essential skill I can sell. This in just 10-15 years time.Perhaps Uncle Mat's Bakery isn't such a bad idea...

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  4. http://www.dieoff.org/index.htm#oildepletion.Slim found this site, folk have been banging on about this for a while. But apathy and blind optimism appears to rule now, head in the sand screaming "it'll be ok". There's a fabulous synopsis on the site as well.

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  5. I stumbled upon the whole Peak Oil thing about 6 months ago and got similarly spooked, like Pete. Raising it in #eed, I met with a lot of "ah, don't worry about it Dave, THE MAN will take care of it all". Admittedly, this calmed my frayed nerves somewhat, but now I find myself on the verge of worrying again - which is probably a good thing.
    It seems that forewarned is forearmed. And four arms scratch more chins than two. So we're well positioned to come up with a plan. Otherwise, as Mat says, we're going to be bang out of luck in 20 years time as civilisation crumbles around us. Short of saying "there's nothing you can do, so fill up your car and drive like the wind baby!", let's try to come up with a list of sensible preperations you can make. 15 years is a long time to get comfortable with a lifestyle change, if we start early...
    - Get Environmental Matey! Time to trade in that vehicle that envys the Space Shuttle's fuel consumption. Let's face it, most of these are just compensations for having a small cock (KV), far better to wear your large penis with pride and scoot around in a nice, efficient polo. You may look like a tool, but you could buy the world an extra couple of years for the boffins over at science HQ to come up with a fuel pill;
    - Recycle! Start seperating out your cans and stuff. The more premade plastic we have, the less we need to extract from oil. And besides, recycling aluminium is a fantastic excuse to drink more beer at home! With any luck, we can recycle so many beer cans that when the apocalypse comes, our fucked up livers will have taken us to the great recycling plant in the sky (and our bodies can be ground down for essential nutrients and fertaliser);
    - Re-train! Who the fuck is going to need IT monkeys when the electricity goes off? No one is going to want a website, or a videogame, so it's time to get looking for some essential skills. Survival is where it's at kids, so first stop should the work of Ray Mears, or 1990's classic plane crash flick "Alive". It might even be worthwhile using up the last of the electricity playing the Nintendo classic farm-'em-up "Harvest Moon". Fun and worthwhile, not many videogames can claim that;
    - Finally, eliminate competition. More mouths means less deer meat for you chum! Best to get rid of evolutionary competitors now! So this is a perfect time to combine survival of the fittest with civic duty - nip down your local government office and turn in all suspected Communists, Nazis, Muslims, Homos, Pinkos and Paedos. The future may be bleak, but at least it won't be Red!
    Get planning people!

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  6. Skipping past Dave's dalliance and back onto the subject at hand. The effect we'll notice first is that oil will have to be supplanted by natural gas for all our energy needs. October issue of SciAm has an interesting article which includes a map of the distribution of natural gas reserves.
    The interesting point here is that the Middle East is not in fact particularly over endowed in natural gas reserves, with the exception of Qatar, but rather the vast bulk of the reserves are to be found in Russia. This will shift the balance of power quite substantially. Perhaps in 20 years the US wont be 'liberating' countries in the Middle East but their attention will once again focus on their old nemesis, Mother Russia?

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  7. Interesting map. Doubly interesting since the reserves off the coast of Britain and Ireland don't even warrant a mention, and they're big enough to provide a hell of a lot of domestic usage gas to these countries, so the statistically important reserves must be bloody enormous.
    What on earth, though, is a "regasification plant"? It sounds like a punchline from a really bad fart joke. I assume it's not.

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  8. That's yanks taking liberties with the language and making up words again. They mean an evaporation plant. Where liquid gas is allowed to expand back into a gas. And if you're talking about the North Sea reserves, I was under the impression that had peaked some time ago and we're now having to buy gas from abroad and this is the reason for our current hikes in energy costs.

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  9. I got around to watching this documentary. Good, if deeply worrying, stuff. I suppose I came away from it with the small reassurance that the Americans (the biggest cause of the mess we're in) will be worst off after the crash. The UK, luckily, already has a relatively good public transport infrastructure and dense, urbanised regions. The transition to a local based economy should be compartively less traumatic for us. Still terrifying in its implications though.
    To play devils advocate for a moment, aside from the upheaval of the transition we'll have to go through, I found myself kind of looking forward to the society that will emerge on the other side. What will be the downside of it? It will be less polluted, have less reliance on cars, have a sensible employment situation where you can get to your place of work in less than 90 minutes. We'll eat far better, healthier food. And it will foster the kind of community spirit that we've sadly lost in the oil age.
    I'm not saying that the coming apocalypse will be anything other than devastating, but if we can get through the nasty bit where we lose everything, then it might just end up being the best thing that ever happened to the human race.

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  10. Death from hunger because our resources won't be enough to support the population is probably a bit of a downside. Lack of heat and light, lack of medicine, having to holiday in bognor instead of LA...

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  11. Okay, admitedly, we'd need to get past the mass starvation, widespread disease, cities filled with bloated, rotting corpses that the overstretched emergency services simply can't handle. And true, the twenty or so winters until we get it sorted out will be so cold that we'll envy those already dead. And yes, okay, maybe humanity will decend into a dark-age-esque anarchy where towns and villages are run by tribal chieftains, and rape and murder is commonplace as the new heirarchy is established...
    But on the brightside... no more fucking Strictly Come Dancing!

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  12. LESS polluted? You need to look back to where we came from. Coal and wood burning. Umph Umph, lets put it like this, standing in the middle of a freeway during rushhour today will seem like a healthcure for the lungs compared to living in a dense place like London in the future. And if you want to find really old trees today you need to go to royal forests, where they were protected. There is a reason for that. It was not that long ago you just couldnt find trees in cities, since people HAD to cut em down for heat. Same with deers and other easy to get animals. And they didnt go out in crap boats to hunt whales for the fun of it. It was because of the oil they contain. And that was for *light*.
    Add the population increase and it all stands clear, we are DOOMED!!! MUAHAHAHAHAHA

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  13. Holy cow, what a blog. Okay, so perhaps there's a period of crisis, or perhaps not, alternative fuels are implemented (at a massive cost to industry, of course), the economy continues for a while.. But then materialism hits a crisis, so everyone who's business is involved in consumer goods (delivery agents, retailers, designers, advertisers, manufacturers, photo libraries (heh)) will die off or face the challange of retasking. IT will survive, but it'll suffer a lot of haemoraging.
    I think you guys are taking it a bit far to assume it's all dark-ages stuff, more of an massive depression and business remodeling period. Scary though, we'd all lose our jobs either way at some point. Time to start building your own corporation that builds self-sufficient communities and promotes green science/business.
    j-corp.com, coming soon to a village near you in deepest England :)

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  14. Jay, take a look around you and name something that's not been created using oil in some way.

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  15. Come on Slim... Jay's put forward a viable business case there: all we need to do is "retask" and "remodel" and we'll be okay. So, in summary, within the current climate we must imagineer efficient platforms.

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  16. To achieve success we must deploy 24/365 mindshare.

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  17. Well I emailed hundreds of MP's and the SNP with a standard email outlining my major concerns on this issue.
    Got two responses.
    One has kicked it up to the shadow energy minister for the lib dems (Norman Baker), the other has been passed to Richard Lochhead MSP, Shadow Minister for Energy & Environment.
    Lib dems recommended the following as a good read - Michael T. Klare the New Geography of Conflict (98 Foreign Affairs).
    Badger your government!

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  18. try imagining NOT to use the John's form 20 th century, but go back to using buckets and tip it out in the backyard to dry, then use that for biomass to generate heat for the winter...man... its gonna be ruff!

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  19. One of the great things about being as old as I am is that I will be dead before the shit hits the fan anyway :-)
    Party on!
    Houmous
    p.s. Watched Sponge Bob Squarepants yesterday - great movie!

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  20. gotta wonder how's other countries - not just USA, and i dont mean the 'Govts' from other countries, i mean ordinary people, HOW are they going to deal with it?Let's say consder geographic, demographic characteristic Now and then (after the crash started), we should try consider how to formulate a play strategy if you will, to respond, or adapt circumstances that govt might try bring out 'super police' or using the Army to police civilians....that's a concern, we must learn NOW how to outwit themi guess, reading true war /detective / defect's stories might give ideas.happy to say im starting a blogs also related to this, but more 'focused' on discussion on how to organise, arm your self, sure going to lessons is one thing, but applying it to the real-life actual OIL-CRISIS scenario is quite another.....my blog for all to join and discuss, planning ideas on HOW to survive not just the early stages, not just the lates stages, but throught the ENTIRE phases...laugh at me if you like, but hell its TIME to share and think about this, it IS a VERY , VERY Serious comtemplation to take on, and frankly I think its high time that 'we' the informed and concerned and not ignorants folks, GET brainstorming !!I mean like i think so far, sort of good discussion, but too general, not really "hoeing our decision-making skills , as to when to leave the house behind, when to use candles, and NOT being dictated by circumstances as a gullible public, but making INFORMED decision according to learned patterns that we conmtrived to recognise in order to SURVIVE by WIT not by CHANCE....sure there differences in laws and policies now , over here and there, but there MUST be a good guidelines that we should come up with...my blog addy is paranoidgrummer.blogspot.com/cheers

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  21. Seems Blair has been reading up and noticing the sky is falling, he's call on experts and is apparently going to try and do something.
    It's quite an interesting article, even if it is too late to do anything other than delay the inevitable. After all, in the land of the short term, will it win an election?

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  22. It seems that as Peak Oil is emerging into the public consciousness and being backed by real scientific evidence, the conspiracy loons are no longer comfortable with crowing about it. Instead they've added a further level of complexity to the whole thing...
    Nutjob Page
    It seems that "Peak Oil" is in fact a fabrication by the oil industry (Zionist funded) to artificially pump up the price of oil and cause widespread misery and poverty. Furthermore, it turns out that oil is not, as we had previously believed, created by biological matter being subject to pressure over eons (despite the masses of evidence that suggests it is). No, oil is actually continuously manufactured in the earth's crust by natural process (despite no evidence to support it). The oil companies and cartels simply tell us it's running out to keep us worried and justify the increasing price.
    Furthermore, the Russians have known this for ages and are currently living the high life on the infinite supplies of free oil they're pumping up from deep wells (despite the fact that they're.. not).
    Good grief...

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  23. God Bless Americans! Heh, that site is priceless. Of course mostly it would appear to be trying to sell things to the weak and stupid. My favorite find there is the VIBE machine which, as the site author explains, "is an electronic device that brings the vibrational level of your body back to its natural state of being, electrically balanced. VIBE stands for Vibrational Integrated Bio-photonic Energizer." Haha, jesus...

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  24. Retarded comments from braindead morons deleted.

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  25. You didnt even read the links. This completely debunks peak oil. www.gasresources.net/Lynch(Hubbert-Deffeyes).htm

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  26. The research they're based on I know well enough. It's not much of a debunk to be honest. Also you lot just claimed that the saudis just revised their reserves up so all must be groovy. They've no interest in doing that or anything and of course they're well known for letting other geolists in to survey them independently... Sheesh, it's time to fetch a clue.

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  27. That site shows how utterly flawed the models used to predict this world peak are. Of course the Saudis have no interest in revising estimates up. That means they must have even more.

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  28. I was being sarcastic you idiot. They have every interest in the world. If you had any idea at all, you'd know that their current rules on how much they pump (Eg how much money they make) are based on reserves. So they keep upping it, despite most of the world's geolists disagreeing with them.

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