Thursday, January 14, 2010

That place we all live, neverland.

If your reading this your addicted to oil. No seriously, that computer your surfing with is made from crude oil. I have created this blog to help in the inevitable changes to come. In the land of "never ending" supplies of oil that everyone seems to be living in. now i am positive that we all know or at least those of us that are willing to pay attention to the occasional price of a barrel of oil, that crude oil is not made in a factory. It is not grown either. you can not distill it in a apparatus similar to those making alcohol. Although you can burn alcohol as a fuel (thats a discussion for later on), oil is quite finite.

I am convinced that in the next fifty years cars will just be lumps of metal sitting in a junkyard and those of us still alive will tell our kids "in my day we used to travel in those things, and we did not even need a horse to pull it!" They will scoff at us and ignore what we have to say as every generation does. it will be a return to the preindustrial age, but with relics all around to remind us about how decadent life was when you burned a black fluid and it made so many things move and created so many things that will never dissolve back into the earth.

Forget about airplanes, unless your flying a hang glider your not going to see anything larger than a bird flying around. The new mass transportation will be trains, and perhaps those two things that most humans are born with attached to their legs.

Some things we will most likely not lose. Mathematics, most forms of knowledge. although some knowledge will be useless as it is totally based on manipulating oil. is the world better off with oil? i cant answer that. i do not believe anyone can answer that?

One thing is certain. we are approaching a point where most of the population of the world will not be able sustain themselves as the price of oil will rise so high as to be too costly. Supply and demand is such a bitch.

This is not about what is going on now. it is about what you and your family is most likely going to have to do 10 years from now in order to get by. If you lost your job at the Toyota plant 15 years from now because no one is buying a new car, this blog is for you. Thats right your in trouble. because if you do not learn skills to help you survive in a preindustrial mindset then your family might only be able to afford the food it can grow on land they most likely do not own.
We need to rediscover life before oil. I hope some people will join me on this path. as we walk further into the future we get closer and closer to the point where oil will just be too expensive to burn, and only the rich will drive automobiles.

I know i will see this in my lifetime. I am 28 years old. I want to be able to adapt to what the world will be like when i am fifty and thrive until i finally die, hopefully around 100. It is time to leave the pixie dust behind, and start realizing that just believing is not going to make it happen. Just believing is not going to make food magically appear on the table Peter Pan. Its time to leave Neverland, and never come back.

-Ryan Williams

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, but the one most responsive to change." Charles Darwin.

P.S. If your curious why i believe such things, check out a blog i follow from Mike Ruppert. he has written some very important books that everyone should read. and go see his movie, Collapse. it will scare the shit out of you. maybe enough to start learning how to survive without oil.

4 comments:

  1. You should become a vegetarian.

    Also, only the rich drive cars now. It's all relative, and in the grand population of the world, still only the rich drive.

    You're a bit apocalyptic. What makes you think that we will become preindustrial, don't you believe that perhaps we are already adapting?

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  2. Hey Ryan, great blog so far. That movie had a big impact on you, eh?

    I'm curious to find out what kinds of knowledge we will lose and what we will keep.

    Do you have a backyard graden?

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  3. I agree with Julie, oil and meat are so tightly wrapped together. You should become vegetarian or at least cut way back. There's a good article on that topic here:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/weekinreview/27bittman.html

    But I also think the electric car will be coming very soon. The only problem with the electric car right now is the battery and every single day I read articles about better batteries (some as much as 10 times better).

    http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2244737/ibm-touts-game-changing-lithium


    As for airplanes, those will likely not run on batteries in the near future, those will likely run on Algae based jet fuel.

    I do agree trains are awesome! we need way more trains!

    Producing all the green electricity for the increased demand now that oil is gone will require a massive investment in power generation and super grid technology. But realisticly, the plans are already in place, they just need about a 500 billion $USD per year for about 10 years. That kind of money is possible if countries take energy independence seriously. See the Desertec project for how this would be done in Western europe.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec

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  4. the reason i think its going to be preindustrial is that all modern factories work using oil based technologies. if there is no more oil or oil is expensive its going to be difficult to produce anything in a factory at a price that will sell. It definitely does sound apocalyptic. but i do not think that its going to be all fire and brimstone.

    My main concern is this, how many things do you buy everyday that are made from oil or use oil in its design?

    now even if that thing you bought does not use oil, or is not made from oil, how much oil is used to get that thing from where it was made to where you are now? when you think about where you get your food from and how far it travels from where it was grown or caught or slaughtered you must think about the trucks, trains, or ships that are all powered by oil.

    its not only production you need to worry about but also logistics.

    One thing i have been thinking about for maybe a month or so is how many sailboats would it take to replace the worlds container ships? or how many ships can actually be retrofitted with sails? More importantly how many ships will become derelict because their companies wont pay for the diesel to run their engines and how will that trade that was missed be compensated for?

    Right now everyone's economy is based on trade from other nations as well as a mix of domestic trade for goods that have a natural economic edge in that specific locality. but when you can only effectively trade with your immediate neighbors (after oil is too expensive to use) how many goods will no longer appear in walmart? 80% 90%? how much is a pot going to cost when you can no longer buy it from china?

    i have so many questions, hence the blog of course.

    I was a vegetarian before. ill become one again, its just that the vegetarian food sucks around here and i definitely need some good recipes. julie, ben, what is that protein thing you used in the chili called?

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