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Dear Friends
Community survival during the coming energy decline
Imagine community life in a world with increasingly scarce and expensive fossil fuel—oil, coal, and natural gas.
“Well, we’ve got off-grid power from solar panels and wind power,” a community might say, “and we’ve got wood stoves, too. No matter how high the price of gas goes, we’ll be fine.”
Perhaps, but does the community buy any food items they don’t grow themselves? While its members can certainly bicycle, car-pool, or use biodiesel to get to the local food co-op, are any of these food items grown, processed, or packaged in other regions?
If so, they’ll pay for the ever-increasing cost of transporting these items into their area. The same is true if the community uses local suppliers for seeds, soil amendments, fencing, hand tools, or other gardening supplies that originate elsewhere, or building supplies from other regions—from lumber to cement blocks to electrical supplies and PVC pipe.
But this is only considering the rising price of gasoline. It’s harder to grasp, but equally true, that the cost of all manufactured goods themselves will steadily increase in price—because manufactured goods are tied to the price of oil. Why?
First there’s the electricity used in factories to manufacture things: the electric power in most regions of the world is generated in power plants fueled by barrels of oil non-renewable fossil fuel.
Second, there’s the use of metal in manufactured items, which must be mined, smelted, and formed into parts—all of which requires electrical power. The same is true of rubber, machine oil, glass, and other materials used in manufactured goods—not to mention the silicon used in items from solar panels to computer chips.
Third, there’s the plastic used in manufactured items themselves, and the plastic used in the packaging and shipping of such items—since plastic itself is made from oil.
What happens when a community’s wind turbine or inverter needs a new part? Most likely its members are used to picking up a mouse or a phone, finding the part hundreds or thousands of miles away, performing an electronic transaction that depends on the fossil-fuel-powered infrastructures of electricity, telecommunications, and banking, and then a large brown truck—powered by fossil fuel—brings the part in a week or so. But with the coming energy decline it, won’t be so easy.
And even if the community did happen to have a “Off-Grid Power Parts ’R Us” franchise nearby, does that store actually mine the copper, aluminum, iron, tin, cobalt, antimony, beryllium, niobium, and various other metals that they smelt, forge, and extrude into wind turbine or inverter parts—and have equally basic methods for obtaining any rubber, plastic, glass, or silicon required for these parts?
And if they do happen to have such parts on hand, their seeming availability just masks the dependence on fossil fuel driven infrastructure that goes to the very core of our civilization.
Well, you get the picture. But there’s more. Many rural communities are already growing at least some of their own food, but outside of the tiny percentage of food that’s organically grown, the entire food industry (and thus, the world’s burgeoning population) is totally dependent on fossil fuel.
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((St.Clair insert:
The Zeta Greys (aliens) want Humans to stay on fossil fuel))
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That’s because most non-organic fertilizer is either made from the byproducts of refining oil, or from natural gas. As a civilization, we are literally eating fossil fuel, from the natural gas that produces virtually all commercial fertilizer; to the diesel farm machinery that prepares the land, weeds the crops, and harvests and distributes the yield; to the energy-intensive processing, packaging, and distribution networks that get the food to us. And this doesn’t even include the fuel used in home preparation and cooking.
Source -- http://www.energybulletin.net/15747.html
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St.Clair:
I will add this and ask you have you seen and really studied the movies "WaterWorld" and "PostMan" by Kevin Kostner? If not. Do so soon. Time is short.
ALL OF THE ABOVE is discussed in much greater detail and in the vast scope back drop of large scale projects designed and presented here, in the chapters "Envisioning An Integrated Future" - "Total Change" - "A Future Vision" -- all parts of the book:
Serving Freedom
and Liberty
