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General News    H3'ed 9/26/10

A Great Future Is in Store for Us When We Take the Power

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When we talk about running short of oil, people's eyes usually glaze over--and for good reason. Nearly everything we do and have is dependent on dread and/or disbelief, which means we will need to confront many difficult questions about our way of life.

For example, how can we commute long distances by car or travel by jet? How will we heat and cool off our homes or power our cities and institutions? Most of our food is trucked 1,500 miles before it gets to the local grocery store. How will we stock our shelves? Many consumer products are made from oil like our clothes, plastics, fertilizers, pesticides, cosmetics, deodorants, detergents, carpets, toothpaste and shoes. What will we have to give up?

What Heinberg makes clear is that the oil we use today will not be available for us tomorrow. The Post Carbon Institute recently ran computer-generated scenarios to explore the prospects of replacing our current economy and it could find none. None! So that means we must change our way of life such that we depend less and less on oil. The primary strategy available to us is conservation and many grassroots people have already begun the following projects:

Co-Op Power (New England) is building a community-owned sustainable energy cooperative

Mission Mountain Food Enterprise (Montana) is the go-between producer and grocer for local foods

Avego is a company that provides tools using private cars for public transport

Bicycle Kitchen (Los Angeles) teaches people how to repair their own bicycles

Transition United States provides networking and training for more sustainable living

Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association educates, advocates, promotes, and publicly demonstrates renewable energy technologies

I don't look forward to the end of the oil age any more than anyone else. It would greatly curtail my air travel and the convenience of my car. I like my home well-heated. I love Texas pink grapefruits in the fall and California vegetables during the winter. I don't want to teach in a classroom where I may have to don an overcoat, hat and gloves. But if oil is too expensive, I may have to make these changes anyway--and many more.

Changing to a new way of living doesn't have to be drudgery. I am currently preparing for the post-peak oil era by learning how to grow food. Surprisingly, this new venture has given me the joy of working the soil, eating good-tasting food, relating to farm animals and feeling great accomplishment after a day's labor. Since I started gardening two summers ago I haven't been sick a single day, which is probably due to being outside in the fresh air so much. I've become more attuned to Nature's ways and enjoy its beauty. I'm meeting and talking to other people who are trying to adapt to the post-peak oil society and have acquired a whole new community of friends.

Many people also fear peak oil because it means the loss of more jobs. However, as a new society emerges, we will require new types of jobs and different skills. Heinberg suggested that the future calls for farmers, energy coaches, home heating/insulation specialists, solar/wind engineers, railroad construction workers, auto and pavement dismantlers, psychotherapists and recyclers to name a few.

However, Heinberg's most hopeful message was that human beings as a species are made to adapt to changing environments and circumstances. We've been through hard times before, he said, and have succeeded in adapting because we are resilient, intelligent and hard working. And, with the future's new challenges, we have an opportunity to re-make our society, which has the potential of being even better than our current one.

Truly, we're in the driver's seat on this one, so to speak, and that gives us a lot of freedom to act rather than rely on someone else or some organization or government to solve our problems.

The solutions to our energy future will require vision, initiative, experimentation, and courage. We can start by talking with our families, neighbors and friends about how to reduce our energy consumption as individual households and in our communities. We can also remember that when it comes to running our own lives, we have the power. Let's use it!

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Olga Bonfiglio is a Huffington Post contributor and author of Heroes of a Different Stripe: How One Town Responded to the War in Iraq. She has written for several magazines and newspapers on the subjects of food, social justice and religion. She (more...)
 
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