America's Perfect Storm: Transition to Survival After Peak Oil Hits

Re: Meeting in Denver, CO for transition of our civilization to the post Peak Oil era

       Speaker Michael Brownlee, Boulder County Transition Team 11/25/08

        www.transitioncolorado.ning.com  ; www.transitiontowns.org

       For more information for next meeting, call Dana Miller 303 300 3547

       Program: “Transition: from oil dependency to local resilience”

A “Perfect Storm” gathers on the horizon as Peak Oil, Economic Instability, Climate Change and Hyper-Population Growth collide within the United States.  While Americans watch multiple breakdowns throughout their economic and environmental systems, a gathering citizen armada prepares for an uncertain future—that most assuredly looms on the U.S. horizon.

Last night, Dana Miller, director of the “Denver Transition Movement” in Denver, Colorado, sponsored Michael Brownlee, a man sporting swept-back silver hair and wearing John Denver glasses, to speak about how average Americans can mobilize to deal with the coming loss of cheap oil energy, called “Post Peak Oil.”  With his compelling power point program, Brownlee addressed a packed house on what all Americans face in the coming decades.

“We face a Perfect Storm with the triangulation of Peak Oil, Climate Change and Economic Instability,” Brownlee said. “These converging factors create a dynamic that we are unprepared for.  James Howard Kunstler addresses them in his book, “The Long Emergency.”” 

Brownlee demonstrated how humans on a global scale wreak havoc on the natural world by producing, “…bigger, faster and more as they eat up the land, fowl the biosphere, lose connection with the earth, sky and water--and each other.  We have lost our sacred connection to all life and with spirit.”

Economic engines wreak mayhem on the natural world.  However, that ravenous global economy we created runs straight toward a wall or over a cliff—take your pick as we run out of oil.  Brownlee provided the audience with sobering graphs showing how world oil production hit its peak or is about to hit its peak by 2010.  From that point onward, everything must contract because nothing can provide the energy that oil provided to keep hyper-population growth accelerating.

Brownlee said, “We must learn how to prepare for the future that’s about to change dramatically.  We are in for some uncomfortable surprises.  Economic growth will reverse course.”

He provided a website for those who remain skeptical: www.thelastoilshock.com ; Steve Andrews at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlOzfS_FV4c

While we run face first into this growing “Hobson’s Choice”, Washington DC ‘risk mitigation’ experts demand a 20 year plan for coping with a world without cheap oil energy.   As anyone with a nose on his or her face can discern, President Bush twiddled his thumbs and stuck fingers in both his ears for the past eight years—as to energy conservation or planning. He treaded water while our civilization stood nostril-deep on its tippy-toes gasping for solutions.

Brownlee told a rapt audience, “It will hit us soon and hard.  We don’t have time or capital to avoid economic consequences.”

He mentioned the Hirsh Report of 2005 that somehow suffered ignominious burying at the hands of the media.  Richard Heinberg, author of “Peak Everything:  Century of Declines”, said, “The world has never faced a problem like this.  The problem will be massive and pervasive.”

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