Note: Adapted from my Energy Matters column, not published yesterday due to a production glitch.
The U.S. military tested early warning radar in Hawaii in 1941. Just after 7 am on the first Sunday in December, two privates sighted a massive number of targets approaching Oʻahu, the island where Pearl Harbor is located, at a distance of 130 miles. The radar operators called in the sighting to the early warning Information Center, where the lieutenant in charge told them not to worry. The Japanese surprise attack remained a surprise, until the bombs started falling.
I sometimes feel like a radar operator who looks out on a warm, sunny Sunday morning and sees blips that augur rapid, unwelcome changes, while most other people continue preparing for an easy day.
In my case, the blips are warning signs that the world is at or near an inexorable decline in oil production, and that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached levels that could suddenly tip the climate into a nearly unrecognizable state.
I’ve met many people who are feeling the same way, and they’re wondering how to tell friends and family about what they’ve learned. Others I’ve met have heard a little about peak oil or climate change and hunger to understand more about them, and what they can do (besides change their light bulbs).
Here are some excellent resources—mostly books, but also a couple DVDs and some web sites—that explain where the world is with respect to peak oil and/or climate change, what needs to be done, and what individuals can do. Their authors’ future visions range from a collapse of industrial civilization to a world full of abundant, renewable energy sources for almost everything we do now. Read them or watch them yourself, or put a bow around them and give them to loved ones. (You may want to get more creative in the packaging if the gift you give is simply some web site URLs.)
The gift can have a profound impact. I was alerted to the urgency of responding to peak oil by two friends who, separately, brought me the DVD “The End of Suburbia” and the book “The Long Emergency.”
Books
The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. James Howard Kunstler, 2005. $14. Kunstler promises to describe how the U.S. is “sleepwalking into the future. We have walked out of our burning house, and we are now headed off the edge of a cliff.” He delivers. Oil has been crucial to economic growth, he writes, and tight oil supplies will deliver oscillating prices, recurrent recessions, further oil wars, depopulation of the suburbs, the breakdown of large-scale international trade, and the reorganization of industrial agriculture. Kunstler expects energy scarcity to leave us less able to respond to climate change, pandemics, water scarcity, and habitat destruction.
Pleasant, eh? Kunstler makes these dire forecasts plausible by showing how dependent the world is on oil and what a tiny fraction of its uses can conceivably be met with renewable energy. His mission: To get readers to start the long process of reorganizing our lives around less energy, before events force us to do so.
Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. Dmitri Orlov, 2008. $17.95 Orlov grew up in the Soviet Union, emigrated to the U.S. at age 12, and began returning frequently to Russia during the period of the Soviet collapse. He thinks the U.S. trajectory towards collapse is where the Soviets were in about 1985. The Soviet economy functioned so poorly in good times, however, that its people were forced to organize informal economies that sustained them as the country and its economy collapsed. Even middle class families often didn’t have sufficient vegetables unless they grew and stored their own, for example. Orlov tells what strategies individuals used to survive the Soviet Union’s collapse and how to apply them to life in the U.S.
Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front. Or One Woman’s Solutions to Finding Abundance for Your Family While Coming to Terms with Peak Oil, Climate Change, and Hard Times. Sharon Astyk, 2008. $18.95 With the subtitle as long as an eighteenth century novel’s, Astyk reveals her background as an English literature Ph.D. student. Having seen the peak oil writing on the wall, she quit the Ph.D. program to repair to the countryside in upstate New York, where she homesteads with her husband (who works off the farm, too) and their four young sons.
Astyk writes clearly, masterfully, and humbly, starting with “a primer on hard times,” and describing how she and her family have prepared by cutting their consumption of energy in most areas to 10% of the U.S. average. The “abundance” Astyk seeks amid the depletion is of pleasurable time with family and friends, stores of food through the winter, warmth in the house, and of learning and exploring ideas. The book includes a 13-page, small-print appendix on things to do to get ready, and 10 pages of “the best books about nearly everything.”
The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience. Rob Hopkins, 2008. $24.95. As I wrote in my previous column (November 23), Hopkins gives an overview of peak oil and climate change, argues that addressing both together means a fundamental shift to local economies, and describes how individuals and communities are relocalizing production of food, energy, and as many other things as feasible.
Winning the Oil Endgame: Innovations for Profits, Jobs, and Security. Amory Lovins and others, 2005. Free for downloading, hard copies $40. Lovins pooh-poohs any imminent peak in oil production, but he offers a wide range of profit-making strategies for individuals, businesses, and governments to increase energy efficiency and make the transition to a society that looks a lot like ours now but is powered by renewable energy. Unlike the other authors above, Lovins and his team believe that sensible, economically driven decisions can lead to a society that is superficially unchanged, except that it is powered entirely by renewable energy.
Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning. George Monbiot, 2006. $22.00 Monbiot, a British journalist, explains the importance of cutting carbon emissions 90% in industrial countries by 2030 and shows how to do it in Britain “while remaining a modern economy.”
Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence.
Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. $15 A practical guide to freeing yourself and your time for what’s really important to you, at a much lower budget than you’re probably living on now.
DVDs
The End of Suburbia. 2004. $23.99 There are now many good DVDs on peak oil; none has surpassed this first one in describing what peak oil is and its implications for the U.S.
The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. 2006. $23 When the Soviet Union collapsed and stopped its flows of subsidized oil, Cuban factories closed, and engineers and lawyers became farmers to support and feed themselves. This hopeful film describes how Cubans imported bicycles, rationed food, adopted organic agriculture with hand implements, and otherwise adapted to come through the crisis.
Web sites
EnergyBulletin.net An international news aggregator about peak oil, climate change, and their effects. Includes some original material.
TheOilDrum.com Contains original, actively debated articles about energy from a peak oil perspective, plus a news aggregator with dozens of stories each day.
vtcommons.org Don’t let the writings on secession put you off this site, which contains a lot of material with a Vermont perspective on energy, food, and increasing Vermont’s resilience in the face of peak oil and climate change.
