Mygreenwheels

'Imagining life without oil, and being ready.'

That's the title of an article in the New York Times about otherwise normal people taking very strange steps to prepare for life after peak-oil. I'll give you some examples. Preparations for a post-petroleum world include growing your own food and stockpiling against shortages or spending three hours on therapeutic telephone calls to help you deal with the prospect of this new world. (Nice to know there's a boom in doom for the counsellors.) Some of the fearful are even converting their investments to gold and silver. These folks who call themselves the 'doomers' are worried that the end of oil will mean food shortages, a collapse of the economy or even a breakdown of civil order.

In the words of one of the US doomers, “Our whole economy depends on greater and greater energy supplies, and that just isn’t possible. I wish I could say we’ll quietly accept having many millions of people unemployed, their homes foreclosed. But it’s hard to see the whole country transitioning to a low-energy future without people becoming angry. There’s going to be quite a bit of social turmoil on the way down.”

You can train your dog to do this in 3 days!Transition US, a British transplant that seeks to help towns brace for life after oil, including a “population die-off” from shortages of oil, food and medicine, now has 68 official chapters around the US, since starting with just two in 2008. Group projects are focused on creating 'community resilience' which in reality seems to range from community vegetable gardens (a very Brit idea) to creating local currency in case the national one crashes and even an enthusiasm for dog carts. How quaint.

But just hold on folks. Have any of you ever thought about learning what a difference electric vehicles can make to this situation? I've been to quite a few energy conferences lately and they're crawling with investors looking to fund renewable energy sources - wind, solar, wave, tidal, biomass, hydrogen and more. Who's going to put their money in fossil fuels now, especially in light of the current BP disaster?

There's a massive investment appetite out there and legions of clever people developing ways to produce clean energy. The world's going to be a better place with less oil, believe me - not just cleaner, but less dependent on the whims of some dodgy governments. And the fact that Warren Buffett is investing in electric cars is enough to convince most of us that it's a bright future.

The gloomy doomer lady I referred to at the beginning of this post has reportedly now read two dozen books about peak oil and related topics. It's said that for a while she became depressed at work and had trouble discussing her feelings with her husband because the conversations 'were so dire'. At work, her colleagues told her directly “that they were tired of hearing about it,” she said. “They felt I was going to an extreme, thinking collapse was going to happen.”

If you're a doomer and you need some cheering up, get yourself along to an auto show where you'll see all the fabulous electric cars that we're going to be driving very soon and how they'll even be able to feed energy back to the grid. And if that doesn't convince you that life as we know it is not about to hit the skids, you can always go back and dig your vegetable patch.