Preparing for Uncertainty and Self Reliance

[C-Mag]

Any opinions on the feasibility of converting pasture or woodlands to farmland?

Pick your poison

[brewster]

How much do you think a barrel of oil will cost when global demand outsrips supply?

Whatever its economic value is vs the alternatives. there's been plenty of times when demand outstripped supply, and economies adjusted. People might have to drive less, have smaller homes, and do other common sense things long before petroleum will cost its weight in gold or whatever you were implying. I believe I'm older than you, I was a teen during the 70s oil shocks, life went on, in smaller cars. Boo hoo.

Honestly, in many ways doubling or tripling of our petroleum price would be the best thing that ever happened to us. Suddenly everyone, not just the Greens, would be interested in making Alternative Energy work. And maybe huge houses in sprawling Suburban cities in states where they need to be air conditioned much of the year will stop being so attractive.

[Speaker to Animals]

What alternative is there to fossil fuels? There exists nothing.

All that stupid shit you think is so great about your city is only possible because there exists a brief window of opportunity where we could burn a shit ton of fossil fuels that took hundreds of millions of years to form. That's it. There's nothing else quite like it.

[Speaker to Animals]

Any opinions on the feasibility of converting pasture or woodlands to farmland?

Pick your poison

I saw some of them before I posted. A good tractor is like 2 grand for a week. I wonder how many acres you can clear in a week of just hard slogging it through the trees, and how much you could get for that lumber to offset the cost of the rental.

[Montegriffo]

I am talking peak oil. When that hits, the costs of transporting food into the cities will be too high. I remain unconcerned with your lot. I hope you all die.

I am talking about the real America here.

Meh, the infernal combustion engine has 20 years left tops.
Transport is going to get even cheaper with electric motors and autonomous vehicles.
Water resources are going to be way more important than oil.
Oil is so 20th-century.

[Speaker to Animals]

I am talking peak oil. When that hits, the costs of transporting food into the cities will be too high. I remain unconcerned with your lot. I hope you all die.

I am talking about the real America here.

Meh, the infernal combustion engine has 20 years left tops.
Transport is going to get even cheaper with electric motors and autonomous vehicles.
Water resources are going to be way more important than oil.
Oil is so 20th-century.

electric aircraft and freighters?

Think about how much additional utility power we will need if we convert the annual fossil fuel consumption to electricity..

[brewster]

I am talking peak oil. When that hits, the costs of transporting food into the cities will be too high. I remain unconcerned with your lot. I hope you all die.

I am talking about the real America here.

Meh, the infernal combustion engine has 20 years left tops.
Transport is going to get even cheaper with electric motors and autonomous vehicles.
Water resources are going to be way more important than oil.
Oil is so 20th-century.

Just so. A number of people here are nuke fans, and some Greens are coming around to it being the lesser evil than carbon or EOTWAWKI. There's all sorts of biomass techs out there that are underfunded because cheap oil makes it a stupid thing to invest in. And that's just the supply side, not the conservation side. Our transport and construction industries are still massively wasteful.

I've been listening to 'Peak Oil' guys like James Howard Kunstler babble about it for decades, and always baffled why it doesn't come true. They're gold bugs too.

[Speaker to Animals]

This is why I write off the existence of the urbanite. They are so emotionally invested in this unsustainable dumpster fire they created that they cannot even process plain fact.

Fossil fuels are a limited resource. When that resource becomes so depleted that, no matter what we do, we can never produce as much annually as the world needs, all sorts of very bad shit will happen, including some nasty wars. But more immediately, the price of oil is going to skyrocket thousands of percent in a single day. There is no way to avoid that. When people generally figure out we reached it, there will be such a run on oil prices that a lot of people are going to become fabulously wealthy in a day, and most of us will be completely fucked.

To maintain a city, all those goods urbanites consume have to be shipped in there. In the case of the average New Yorker, we are talking about a small area on the map that is completely dependent on shipments from around the entire planet.

Instead of realizing this is a self-evident truth (and it is), they will engage in fantasy about some magical technologies that just must be invented in time to save them. Good luck with that.

The obvious solution to this problem (outside of letting the big cities die as they should), is local production, especially for food. There really is no other way around that. If you want to argue that obvious point, then go create another thread.

In this thread, let's talk about self-reliance. If you live in NYC, you don't belong in this thread for obvious reasons.

[Montegriffo]

I am talking peak oil. When that hits, the costs of transporting food into the cities will be too high. I remain unconcerned with your lot. I hope you all die.

I am talking about the real America here.

Meh, the infernal combustion engine has 20 years left tops.
Transport is going to get even cheaper with electric motors and autonomous vehicles.
Water resources are going to be way more important than oil.
Oil is so 20th-century.

electric aircraft and freighters?

Think about how much additional utility power we will need if we convert the annual fossil fuel consumption to electricity..

Electric aircraft are a lot closer than manned Mars missions yet you have no difficulty conceiving them.

[Speaker to Animals]

Meh, the infernal combustion engine has 20 years left tops.
Transport is going to get even cheaper with electric motors and autonomous vehicles.
Water resources are going to be way more important than oil.
Oil is so 20th-century.

electric aircraft and freighters?

Think about how much additional utility power we will need if we convert the annual fossil fuel consumption to electricity..

Electric aircraft are a lot closer than manned Mars missions yet you have no difficulty conceiving them.

I can conceive them just fine. I can also do the math and realize that the cost to operate them will be many times that of existing aircraft transport.

The argument is not that we can't possibly transport goods. The argument is that the cost to do so is going to be exponentially higher.