Barry Krusch - Peak Oil and What To Do About It

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PEAK OIL AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

2012 by Barry Krusch. All rights reserved.

Important Announcement

I have a new book coming out, which will be called Impossible: The Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald . You are one of the first people to know about it!! Here is the cover:

My new book will be divided into multiple volumes, and when it is released I plan to make the first volume available for free on the 22nd of every month (as long as I am provided that capability), in honor of the anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

What I learned after writing it! After you read Impossible: the Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald , you may see the slogan "Remember the 22nd!" in the same way 19th-century Americans saw the slogan "Remember the Alamo!

The real story of the Kennedy assassination is that hardly any Americans know the real story of the Kennedy assassination. But it's a story every American needs to know... and act on.

Introduction

When I first wrote the first chapter of this book related to Peak Oil, back in 2008, things were very, very intense on the energy front.

Now, in 2012, four years later, I have had a chance to go back and review the material I wrote related to Peak Oil, when things have calmed down.

On re-reading the material, I realize that I should have given greater weight to telecommuting, the lowest of the low-hanging fruit on the energy-savings tree, and the technology is there right now to roll it out in a massive way over the next decade, and if there is ever to be any saving grace, that is it.

So, when you read the upcoming chapter related to Peak Oil, the essential message that it sends is still accurate, but I now believe that many of the negative factors which I had discussed back in 2008 can be circumvented, at least in the short term, simply by moving people out of offices and into their homes. Doing this for the 30% to 50% of people for whom this strategy would be viable (anyone who works exclusively with the computer or with the telephone) could provide massive, fast drops in energy consumption that will buy valuable time.

That's the good news. Now for the reality check.

Peak Oil is one problem, but there are many, many other problems. Open up your newspaper, and choose one. Of course, what you see as a "problem" might depend on your political perspective: for example, if you consider yourself a "liberal," you might think of global warming as a problem, whereas you might be less inclined to think that if you were a "conservative." From the opposite perspective, you might be more inclined to think of the national debt as a problem if you are a conservative, versus a liberal.

In truth, both of these are problems, but we don't really need to agree on what the problems are, just that there are problems, and that we have a much larger problem responsible for both of these, our government.

So, which of these problems do you care about? Peak Oil, national debt, global warming, wars overseas, inadequate public education... it doesn't really matter, it all can be traced back to same thing. A political system that just flat out is not functioning the way it ought to be.

Yes, at the root of all these problems is a malfunctioning government . Just imagine, if the government had been functioning correctly over the last fifty years, would we find ourselves in this position, having to rely on absolutely key strategic material for the most part supplied by enemies of the United States? Wouldn't it have been a lot smarter to use the trillions of dollars that we have used in military attempts to secure oil supplies on alternative energy sources, whether they be wind, solar, nuclear, or what have you?

Just imagine where we would have been if, in 1980, we had started to take a Manhattan Project approach to solving the energy problem the same way that we solved the problems of developing the atomic bomb and putting a man on the moon. Had we taken this approach, millions of homes now would have had solar water heating on the roofs of the houses, cities would have had centralized solar systems, and the wind channel coming down the Midwest part of the United States and the immense amount of sunlight falling on the Southwest United States could have provided hundreds of gigawatts to the east and west coasts. Our rail system could have been revived in the same way that Japan has taken advantage of the technology, with bullet trains crisscrossing states and connecting metropolitan centers. Zoning laws could have reconfigured cities to bring places of business and residences closer together to prevent the need for miles upon miles of daily commuting. And so forth and so on.

But it wasn't done, and so here we are: at this moment, gasoline around $3.50 a gallon, and jobs miles and miles away. Yes, the price can go down again, but it can also go up, and going up is a much more likely prognosis for the future. Current data shows that the most oil the world ever produced was in 2008, and we are probably at 2005 levels now, but demand now, many years later, with India and China far more industrialized, is greater.

So the question is, what can we do about it? To that end, I have written this book, compiling numerous materials I've written over the years that are relevant to the solution. Three of the documents are directly related to Peak Oil: The Peak Oil Crisis: Everything You Need to Know in Less Than Ten Minutes! , The Rising Price of Oil: a Tale of Two Lobsters , and Operation Energy Transition: the Intelligent Community Response to the Peak Oil Crisis .

This last document takes us to the heart of this book. What can we really do about peak oil? Boycott Exxon for day? Write our congressperson? Hold up a picket sign in front of City Hall? Don't think so!

It is time to start thinking out-of-the-box, and come up with solutions that actually work . The solution called The Intelligent Community Initiative (more on this later) is one that does not involve government, but involves private citizens. Those of a conservative bent may be more inclined in that direction.

Another possibility involves direct political change, and your author confesses that to him, this is the most interesting! There is one fantastic option, creating and ratifying amendments for the Constitution demanded by the twenty-first century, but none of those suggestions are in this book. If you would like to read an alternative Constitution, I have written one, and it is called The 21st Century Constitution, available for the Kindle on Amazon.com, which I will make available for free on the 22nd of every month , as long as Amazon provides me with that ability.

However, in my experience, very few people are prepared to evaluate new constitutions, so faster solutions (and solutions more palatable) have to be conceived.

That takes us to the next three documents: The Voice Voting Strategy , The Write-in America FAQ , and The Carolina Reorg FAQ . To me, these are the most important chapters in this book, so let's go over them.

All of these documents are predicated on the same concept: we can no longer afford to elect representatives who make promises that they don't keep. We need to treat representatives as we would treat employees of a corporation, because, in fact, that is what they are functionally identical to. If you don't do what you say you will, out you go! If you say you will do something, sign a contract with some teeth in it when you breach. But how do we get these representatives to sign these contracts? That is what those documents are about.