Peak oil

The other big issue that we addressed at the PCC Away Day for St John's Seven Kings at Peterhouse was that of peak oil and its effect on the current economic turmoil. For this, we made use of Sam Norton's Let Us Be Human materials and the session 'Peak Oil revisited' in particular.

In this session, which was prepared in 2006, Sam suggests that the economic impacts of peak oil that will work through include the following:

• Transport will become extremely expensive. To begin with we will respond by forming car pools to keep the system ticking over, people will share cars much more. And the electric rail will continue.
• Food is going to start becoming very expensive unless we set up local food sources. I think it is one of the most important things that we need to do. We need to ask ourselves the question, “Where is our food going to come from?” Talking to one of the Mersea farmers the other day, and talking about the possibility of shifting to organic production of food on Mersea Island, he said, “Well the thing is, if you take away fossil fuel fertiliser, to get an indication of what the result will be, look at what was farmed a hundred years ago.” And basically Mersea Island had sheep. The soil isn’t good enough to grow crops on without the input of fossil fuels. So Mersea Island is not going to be independent in terms of it’s food supply.
• Heating is going to be expensive. You have already noticed this in your bills because the gas peak is also imminent, and whereas oil declines gradually in a safe world, gas falls off a cliff. So much more house sharing, grannies will live with parents.
• Electricity will become very expensive. All these labour saving devices are only possible when energy is cheaper than human labour. That ratio will reverse. Human labour will be cheaper than electricity.
• Following that through, lots of businesses will fail, airlines are the canaries in the coal mine. Four out of six American airlines are now in chapter eleven bankruptcy proceedings.
• Unemployment will rise initially as all the businesses fail but then there will be a great demand to go back to the land.
• The stock markets will contract so think about pensions, think about stipends, what’s going to happen to the housing market – I haven’t got a clue. Is there going to be inflation? Is there going to be deflation? Who knows?
• We are looking at minimum at a re-run of the 1930’s in terms of the scale of what’s being faced.

People were impressed with the extent to which Sam had been accurate in predicting what is now beginning to unfold in our economy and showed interest in exploring the idea of transition initiatives further possibly by a visit to Mersea Island to see what Sam and others are involved in there.

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Bob Dylan - Not Dark Yet.