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Preparedness for when

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  • Life would be very different to the society we have now. Life would be much more 'local' and perhaps you'd see communities working together to provide for themselves. I think it would be a hard and arduous life and if the utilities were either unaffordable or unavailable most of your energy would be expended on trying to grow/rear enough food to feed yourselves and maintain the housing stock and clothing/footwear, domestic equipment that we all have when it happens. The old skills will be there for the few of us who have kept them alive, we could if there was time and will teach others how to do things but I suspect the biggest problem in that situation would be keeping the things you'd grown/made long enough to be able to take advantage of them because there would be many people who would be intent on taking those things for themselves, having had no part in their cultivation or manufacture. There would be a law and order vacuum and even a starving lawman would steal to feed his family if they were starving!
  • COOLTRIKERCHICK
    COOLTRIKERCHICK Posts: 10,510 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    In certain states in America its against the law to grow or produce your own food in your garden etc.. I wonder if there was a scenario where the lack of oil etc pushed food prices so high that people were producing their own locally etc that the big global food companies would put pressure on the governments to ban growing your own food and collecting your own water ??
    Work to live= not live to work
  • GreyQueen
    GreyQueen Posts: 13,008 Forumite
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    :( It's only a matter of time before we run out of oil. We can run out of it more rapidly or more slowly, depending on our choices, but run out of it we must.

    What happens to societies when their very underpinning dwindles? Our underpinning is oil and, to a lesser extent, natural gas. We mostly don't even think about this, any more than goldfish probably think about water - it just is.

    Societies don't tend to sit down and have serious conversations about resources and make hard decisions for the common good, and stick to them for generations. There have been a few smallish places where this has happened (check out Jared Diamond's work for examples) but, mostly, what happens is rationing by price.

    As things become scarce, they becoming more expensive, and the poor suffer first and suffer most. The richest will do everything to make sure that they will suffer last, and preferably not at all. Middling people will strive hard to sustain lifestyles to which those of us in the global West have become accustomed.

    The driver being oil, those countries which have it will be either protectorates of superpowers or so powerful in their own right that they can dictate terms to superpowers. Military spending will increase as people in power understand that when the lights go off for good, their days in power are numbered, and probably their very lives. This means that the world will become an ever-more war-torn and dangerous place as the oil runs out.

    Projecting modern military power is incredibly oil-intensive. There will come a time when there is insufficient energy to fight to control insufficient oil and gas fields. You have a global superpower like the US which has its soldiery in nearly 200 countries. What will happen when the centre cannot hold, if they cannot make payroll, if supplies to their overseas forces dry up, if communications go dark and stay dark?

    I think you'll have some serious militias forming out of the remnants of national armies and fighting for a share of the pie. It's what always happens when empires fail - the age of the warlord. Plus every thug with enough charisma to motivate a following will be at it, too.

    Things will inevitably localise, but there will be painful convulsions first. And not everyone will want to bend their back to till the soil, or do anything productive. There will be people who just want to take what others have created, through taxation and control of the means of production (governments being only the most modern manifestation of this). And, as civil society and law slides further, there will be loss of property rights and outright thefts of property, whether your house, your harvest, your nubile daughter or your comely young son.

    Humanity has a default setting which is effectively a warrior aristocracy offering protection to its chosen group in return for its keep, and the best of everything inc their pick of the womenfolk. In return for all that, and subservience, they will defend the tribe from other warlords and their henchmen.

    The warlord and henchmen will be abetted by the clerics, as they always have been. The clerics will want to be kept in near-idleness also, and will organise society so that they neither have to work nor fight. They will actively erode education (other than indoctrination in their brand of superstition) and will use psychological manipulation to control people who have been trained from birth to be ignorant, credulous and gullible.

    Because anything else is heresy, and we know what happens to heretics, hey?

    Post oil, with the main driver of activity back to being human muscle power, you will risk seeing the return of bonded labourers (they've never gone away in some parts of the world) and outright slavery.
    Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.
    John Ruskin
    Veni, vidi, eradici
    (I came, I saw, I kondo'd)
  • COOLTRIKERCHICK
    COOLTRIKERCHICK Posts: 10,510 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    So like the middle/ dark ages..

    How many years of oil do they say we got left??
    Work to live= not live to work
  • GreyQueen
    GreyQueen Posts: 13,008 Forumite
    Tenth Anniversary 10,000 Posts Name Dropper Photogenic
    So like the middle/ dark ages..

    How many years of oil do they say we got left??
    :( Unknowable.

    Those who know for sure aren't at liberty to say. We are reckoned to have passed Peak Oil already and be on the start of the downslope to the post-oil age. A lot of the oil remaining will have to remain, as it is in places where it would take more energy to extract it than it would provide. It's called EROEI - energy returned over energy invested.

    If it takes the energy equivalent of 2-3 barrels of oil to extract 1 barrel of oil, it stays in the ground. Unless and until there is some game-changing technological development which means that EROEI no longer applies.

    Some educated observers reckon we could be seeing consquences as early as the 2030s, but definately by the 2050s. Which would put earlier part of the timeframe in my own old age, but definately means it will be in the lifetime of people who are presently children.

    Not going the be easy to be the first post-oil generation.
    Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.
    John Ruskin
    Veni, vidi, eradici
    (I came, I saw, I kondo'd)
  • Frugalsod
    Frugalsod Posts: 2,966 Forumite
    Tenth Anniversary Combo Breaker
    So like the middle/ dark ages..

    How many years of oil do they say we got left??

    Possibly a century but longer if we switch to other energy forms. Peak oil is peak oil production and we are close to that peak. We could have oil for many decades but if we squander it then there will be dire consequences for our descendants.
    It's really easy to default to cynicism these days, since you are almost always certain to be right.
  • RAS
    RAS Posts: 35,776 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
    Frugalsod wrote: »
    I was not restricting solutions to permaculture but would like to see any form of efficient farming solutions.

    I see bio-intensive, permaculture and savory as being complementary.

    When I think about zoning, I see biointensive being used to grow the maximum crops in some zone 1 and 2 areas (Jeavons included fruit bushes and trees), more permanent planting in zones 2,3 and 4, particularly on more vulnerable land (steep for example) and protecting main crop areas if needed, Savory essential in dry land situations like the Mediterranean but also useful in managing upland and lowland/flood plain pastures quite possibly with seasonal rotation (see GAP http://www.grazinganimalsproject.org.uk/index).

    And I would want to be looking to multiple outcomes like wool/skins and dung and meat and other fertilisers, timber, wood, fuel, fibres, chemicals.
    If you've have not made a mistake, you've made nothing
  • COOLTRIKERCHICK
    COOLTRIKERCHICK Posts: 10,510 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    edited 6 January 2016 at 7:40PM
    And is that with consumerism staying as it is? Or do you think this has factored in growth??

    They can start by taxing useless gimmicky crap lol...

    Hubby is/ was a mechanic and worked for a !ain ford dealership for umpteen years, and used to go on update courses etc if they brought out a new engine etc
    Going back 18 plus years ago the word was that someone had invented an Englne that would run on water and a huge oil company bought the blueprint, and locked it away.. As this would have devalued oil instantly...

    How true this is?? I don't know, but I wouldn't be suprised
    Work to live= not live to work
  • RAS
    RAS Posts: 35,776 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
    So like the middle/ dark ages..

    How many years of oil do they say we got left??

    CAT reckon we could produce half the energy we currently use in this country using renewables and halve our our energy consumption quite easily (and groups challenged to reduce it by 30% have managed 50% on a domestic basis).

    The imponderables are travel, transport and infrastructure. For example there is no milk bottling plant in Wales so it all has to be transported to England and back. And consequently much of the processing is also outside Wales. Whether "someone" would have the wit to plan sensibly distributed abattoirs, processors, build canal transport, sail ships whilst we still had access to the resources...............

    The other questions has to be whether we would have to share those reduced resources with people who are leaving more difficult situations and unrest.
    If you've have not made a mistake, you've made nothing
  • [Deleted User]
    [Deleted User] Posts: 0 Newbie
    Eighth Anniversary 10,000 Posts I've been Money Tipped!
    edited 6 January 2016 at 7:42PM
    I guess the way to keep what you produce would be to deliberately grow crops that most folks wouldn't recognise as food, a swede looks very much like cattle fodder (mangolds) when it's field grown and still has its leaves attached, Parsnips also don't look like parsnips unless you know what the leaf is like and using old fashioned ways of storing those crops like clamping and root cellars would make them not so obvious as food sources to those intent on taking them. Grow things that aren't popular like beetroot and Jerusalem artichokes which will sustain you well because they are fairly calorific. You'd have to be inventive and artful to save what you could for yourselves.
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