The War is in Words

2008-05-21T14:27:00.001-07:00

Beginning. Again.

I didn't really think I'd come back here after finishing the World Without Oil simulation, but now that the simulation is taking on the appearance of reality -- that is to say, now that the price of a barrel of oil has hit $134 on the futures market and gasoline is selling locally for $4.05 a gallon of regular -- well, hey . . . looks like we're livin' the dream. Who'd have thought it could happen so fast? And for no immediately apparent reason? I mean, they haven't shut down the Straits of Hormuz. The impending attack on Iran has yet to materialize. No hurricane has swirled its way into the Gulf of Mexico, shutting down production. What gives, eh?

What apparently "gives" is that oil exporters are beginning to hold back product, hoarding or husbanding it for future sale as well as to meet rising domestic demand in their own countries. Our president can even go to his good buddies in Saudi Arabia and beg them to open up the taps a little (something they've promised and failed to do several times over the last few years) and be politely but firmly turned down. Are they saying no because they just don't feel like it - or because they are actually incapable of increasing production by any significant increment? Does it matter? Well, yes, because if they can increase output, then this energy crisis, like those of the 70s, is a manufactured predicament, with a political solution. But if it isn't (and that's where I've placed my bet), the predicament has its basis in geology -- and that really doesn't have a solution. You can drill more, and burn it, and open up wildlife preserves and fragile offshore ecosystems to oil production, and burn that oil, and suck the last few remaining drops out of all of those wells that were prematurely capped after they peaked, and you'll get a little bump up in production for a short period of time. But the overall trend, as we sail over the Peak, will inevitably be down.

I attended a community forum on transportation today, lots of political bigwigs in attendance - the head of the Metro Transit District, the head of City Planning, city council persons, county supervisors. They think the problem lies on the demand side and that that can be fixed. They're right, in a sense, although they blame the supply problem on OPEC (and those pesky treehuggers who insist on keeping the oil companies out of ANWR). Well of course, they have to, because they aren't empowered to do anything on that end. The only concrete solution they were able to float out there, in the face of an economy sliding into recession and the consequent falling tax revenues smashing into budget shortfalls at every level of government, was some modest form of rationing. That's it. Rationing.

And so it begins. For real this time.

2007-11-18T20:55:00.000-08:00

Did I mention I'm an animator? Yes, I believe I did.

2007-06-01T15:11:00.000-07:00

What Have We Learned?

And so, as I send my ghostly self off to seek reunion with his family in Ohio, it’s time to doff the fictional disguise, pull back and take the long view of the month-long oil crisis simulation exercise that was World Without Oil.

I don’t know how many people, stumbling on this blog by accident, followed the links back to the explanation for its existence. I’m pretty sure that “geoff” did not, (he commented on an early entry that, for riding my bike in Los Angeles traffic, I was “another target on the road -- get a car you freak.”)

I never wanted to break the illusion within the space of the blog that I was actually living in this alternate reality that included the onset of Peak Oil in the form of a sudden spike in the price of gasoline, triggering societal and economic collapse; so I provided readers with no indication, other than the aforementioned link, that this was a War of the Worlds-type simulation. Given that some of the events mentioned in the blog overlapped with events in the real world (e.g., the local immigration protest and riot in MacArthur Park), one might very well have concluded that the author was hallucinating some sort of paranoid delusion. But often, that’s what immersion in Peak Oil literature feels like anyway.

World Without Oil, as its designers describe it, was an “alternate reality event, a serious game for the public good. It invite(d) everyone to help simulate a global oil shock. People participate by contributing online stories, created as though the oil shock were really happening.”

The “event” ran throughout the month of May, 2007, with each day advancing the chronological pace of events and contextual storyline by one week, a scheme that was initially a little difficult to get used to. Escalating events tumbled on top of each other, condensing considerably the amount of time one had to react to them, or to make plans as to what should come next. And you never knew where it was going to go. In addition, some user contributions (a report of a U.S. “incursion” into the Canadian tarsand fields, a charge that the U.S. President had ordered an airstrike on Watts [!?]) tended to throw a few hard-to-integrate incidents into the mix. In general, for my part, I ignored them.

Since the initial unexplained price spike of a dollar or so per gallon was supposed to have occurred on April 30, that was the first day for the submission of blog entries, photos, videos, podcasts, email and/or phone messages contributing to a collaborative fiction which eventually summed up to a grand total of 32 weeks of “crisis,” ending in early December of this year, though things seemed to sort of settle down over the last couple of days (weeks) as the nearly eighteen hundred registered “heroes” or, as they were called on the site “Netizens”, began to sense that the end (of the simulation) was near.

What was the point? Again, according to the site’s designers, “World Without Oil aims to help fill a huge gap in our nation’s thinking about oil and the economy. As people everywhere grapple with the problem of growing global demand for petroleum, no one has a clear picture of oil availability in the future, nor is there a clear picture of what will happen when demand inevitably outstrips supply. That will depend in large part upon how well people prepare, cooperate, and collectively create solutions. By playing it out in a serious way, the game aims to apply collective intelligence and imagination to the problem in advance, and to create a record that has value for educators, policymakers, and the common people to anticipate the future and prevent its worst outcomes. ‘Play it, before you live it.’”

So the simple question to be asked is, given its self-stated goal, did this online simulation accomplish its purpose?

For my part, I honestly have my doubts, though I have to confess that I have not read every blog entry or perused every video submitted; and, in fact, due to a ten day hiatus when I was out of the country and unable to access the site, there’s a big hole in the middle of my personal experience of the simulation as evidenced by my lack of entries between the fifteenth and twenty-fourth of the month.

Still, my impression is that the site was no more than a momentary blip on the radar of Internet traffic, even in the relatively small pond that represents interest in the subject of Peak Oil online; to my knowledge, it was only given a couple of mentions and not actively discussed on the web’s best Peak Oil site, The Oil Drum.

Why should this be? It appears to have been well-funded (though not terribly well-publicized) by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and, despite a couple of technical glitches, well-produced by something called ITVS Interactive (Independent Television Service) and WriterGuy LLC. The participation of these organizations, however, raises the question as to whether this was really, in and of itself, a legitimate civic-minded thought experiment to plumb the depths of the public’s fears, concerns, reactions, and possible solutions to such a crisis; or, was the general public (the part with access to the Internet and an interest in the topic) being mined for content to act as creative contributor to some sort of future television series or special on the subject? The answer to that question remains to be seen.

At one point before the experiment began, Matt Savinar, owner of the popular Life After the Oil Crash site, even suggested that this might be a sort of fishing expedition on the part of shadowy government agencies attempting to take the temperature of the citizenry by inviting them to spin out their fantasy scenarios in a public forum. Hm, well, could be . . .

I guess my question would be, what sort of an impact did the experiment itself have? On that score, and without having access to statistical data (the blog I dedicated to the experiment doesn’t count visitors, and I don’t know how many folks eventually checked into the WWO site) I’d have to say not much at all, although the “players” themselves, at least the ones who posted regularly, seemed to register a good deal of “parting is such sweet sorrow” style emotion in their final posts, as if we were all graduating high school together. And I’m not putting that down by pointing it out: online community is a very real kind of experience for many people, though one that qualitatively differs from actual face-to-face type community, a distinction that is often lost on people deeply invested in creating such things. I am, as I noted at one point in this blog sequence, one of those people so invested, by the way.

And that’s why, apart from my concerns about the magnitude of what James Kunstler calls the “converging catastrophes of the twenty-first century”, Peak Oil and Climate Change, this experiment drew me in. I desperately wanted to find out what a diverse group of people, widely scattered over vast geographical distances, thought might occur under such circumstances.

I’d have to say that I was disappointed in the degree of participation, on the one hand, and in the quality of the participation as well. I imagine that the site’s creators might protest, “Well, it was up to you to make it better!” And I’d concur (mea culpa!), with the small exception that online community is a collaborative experience that takes place in a designed arena. You provide people with the toolkit and the parameters of play and set them to work. The quality of the tools you provide (and the arena) determines, to some extent, the quality of the experience. I personally did not find the collaborative experience all that compelling, but that may just be me. Nonetheless, this is a subject in which I am deeply involved – so why was this virtual incarnation of it ultimately so unsatisfying?

This is just speculation on my part, but I think the answer to that question lies within the participants themselves, including the site designers – and so I do in fact include myself in their number. We all live inside a fish bowl, and it is very difficult for we fish to comment on the nature and quality of the water we daily swim in – or what might happen to us all were the amount of water in the bowl suddenly cut in half.

It seems to have been very hard for people to imagine what existence in a world without oil would really look or feel like. This became most obvious in the video contributions, where life was clearly proceeding along pretty much as normal in the background, while the guy in the foreground was trying desperately to pretend that existence was tough and things were falling apart all over. It had a sort of silly quality to it, and while I’ve entertained a number of scenarios of what could occur with the onset of Peak Oil, “silly” hasn’t really entered the picture very often.

Folks contributing little community-based “missions”, hiding caches of tools for others to locate or creating games, puzzles and other “fun” activities didn’t really strike me as credible or effective responses to the kinds of problems Peak Oil has the potential to create. It’s not that I scoff at the indomitable quality of the human spirit or our ability to laugh and entertain ourselves in times of trouble – but folks, the world was supposed to be coming apart at the seams. There was a lot of work to be done – or there would be, if the situation were as serious as it was at first made to seem.

This was a theme I tried to incorporate in my blog, because, if the real situation should in fact overtake us, I think a major problem will indeed be that the general populace will not take it seriously enough soon enough to do what needs to be done to prevent massive social and economic disruption. The evidence? Look around you now. Are we busy making preparations? The Hirsch Report, published by the Department of Energy two years ago, said we should have started twenty years ago. Do you see anybody other than a few Internet hotheads, a couple of not-terribly-well-known authors and Rep. Bartlett of Maryland taking this issue seriously?

I don’t. I think we’re busy whistling past the graveyard, amusing ourselves with visions of an ever more abundant future and “cool” cars that run on biomass and leftover frying oils.

Okay, that said, I did learn a few things from this experiment, the first of which I communicated to one of the site organizers who emailed me early on with words of encouragement (that were greatly appreciated. Thank you, yuckymuck.) I wrote back that one of my first discoveries derived from the process of imagining the scope of the crisis was this: that being aware of the problem is not the same as being prepared for it. For as long as I have been aware of this problem, I have actually done woefully little to address it in practical terms, other than to reduce the amount of my debt, compost my garbage, and plant a vegetable garden in the backyard.

Secondly, at some point I realized that the world was going to divide into two parts, one With Oil and one Without – or rather, one Without the Ability To Pay for Oil. That would be the first stage of a long slow process of splintering and collapse: one part of the world (the part that could afford it) would go on behaving as usual, probably with the collusion of government and an extensive black market economy, and another part would take a dramatic step down in quality of life, perhaps even giving up altogether and being rounded up and shuttled off into government-sponsored “relocation camps.”

I’d never really thought about this before, or about how much violence might accompany such a split in the social and economic fabric of the country, but I seemed to be forced to that conclusion by the circumstances I was describing. It was a sobering experience, and I have to say that, as I began to invest a certain amount of imaginative energy in the process, the dark feelings of the virtual experience began to bleed over into my everyday real life experience. I began to wander around, looking at the things I was certain were about to vanish from my life. The mood colored the remainder of my writing on the subject and, ultimately, led me to banish my fictional alter ego from the community he had helped to form but of which he had never really felt a part. Like many quintessentially American literary figures, he was finally fated to be sent off on an unresolved search for someplace to call home.

The third thing I discovered in the writing was that a recognizable moment of total collapse would never actually come; there would only be a long grinding series of shockwaves that would gradually make the structure, our fossil fuel-based economy, more and more inhospitable and eventually uninhabitable. I used the metaphor of earthquakes in Los Angeles, and the way we deal with such disasters here; but I really think the metaphor applies to a temperament that is peculiarly American, but maybe also peculiarly human as well, this ability we have to live in a shithouse and dream about voyaging to the stars.

Finally, though I have voiced criticism of the experiment and what I view as its result, the jury is still out. It may very well have a wider significance than I have granted it. I personally want to thank the people responsible for it for their efforts and for having provided me with the opportunity to participate. Ultimately, it was a rewarding if somewhat frustrating experience; I would like to see more like it.

This very long essay caps off the series for WWO, and probably my contributions to this blog as well. I would like to request that if you found any of this writing at all compelling and want to see what else I’m cooking up, please visit my regular blog here, in which I’ve previously published some additional essays on the nature of virtual worlds. It is a part of a virtual storefront for a book I self-published awhile back called Chronological Order, a collection of my writings from which the concluding poem “Illumination” was reprinted. Until then, or until Peak Oil brings the whole mad enterprise crashing down around us – take care, my friends. Stay safe, stay sane, and stay alive.

2007-05-31T09:23:00.000-07:00

World Without Oil: Illumination

we burned
we burned it all

you who have come after us
have seen our path
emblazoned on your earth
our scorched road
your sterile sea
the blackened sky
the trail of our hunger

we burned
we burned it all

treasures pulled up from the ground
we piled high
and set afire
a beacon on the shore of night
a prayer, a plea we danced,
we sang around our pyre
and sacrificed your future

we burned
we burned it all

in our homes, in our cars
on our way toward the stars
still, so very far away, so cold
so far beyond our reach
tiny fires that give no heat
do you stare at them
and curse us, we

who burned
we burned it all

2007-05-30T08:22:00.000-07:00

World Without Oil: Where Things Stand

“Peak Oil may be the trigger for a global economic depression that lasts for many decades. Or it may not. It may plunge us into violent anarchy and military rule. Or it may not. But if Peak Oil doesn’t wake us up to the precariousness of our condition, divorced from our roots in the soil and the forest, annihilating the evolutionary systems that sustain us and replacing them with brittle, artificial, plastic imitations, what will? What will it take?

“. . . It was only a short time ago, two centuries at most, that we fell into our energy addiction and started down a path to ruin. Peak oil is an opportunity to pause, to think through our present course, and to adjust to a saner path for the future. We had best face facts: we really have no choice.”

-- Albert Bates, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook

Albert Bates’ book is one of the volumes that got me through this first phase of the crisis. It’s a great little book, packed with invaluable information, everything from how to ferment sauerkraut to how to tie a sheet bend knot and do basic first aid. I never got around to trying the recipe for Grasshopper Quesadillas, but I may at some point. The other book I’m taking with me is Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual. Indispensable.

I’ve been on the phone over the last several weeks with my daughter and my family back in Ohio, and it became increasingly clear that that is where I am needed. The family has banded together, pooled their resources and survived; and the area, though devastated economically, has not suffered the paroxysms and spasms of violence that have plagued Los Angeles. The Amish in the region, who were way ahead of this curve, served as a stabilizing (and educating) influence. Though winters can be harsh and the growing season shorter, unlike Los Angeles, there is plenty of water to be had – and in my opinion, severe drought and water shortages will be the next plague to hit our benighted population here. How will we practice urban agriculture then, I wonder? Well, if all goes as planned, I will not be here to find out.

What finally answered the “stay or go” question for me? Thanksgiving. We celebrated it together in the neighborhood, gathering in the street that has become our public plaza and makeshift marketplace. We were able to purchase many of the essentials, and we broke into some of our home-canned, dried and cured stuff from previous harvests. It was a semi-traditional feast and, as is usual with Americans, there was too much food. But none of it was wasted. Everyone who showed up went home well-fed.

At the start of the celebration, someone offered up a prayer of thanks. In it, they thanked God (but didn’t mention Him by Name, I noticed) for seeing us all through the crisis . . . now that it has passed!

Really? I sort of had a problem with that.

Which world are these people living in, I wondered? They might have at least offered up a little prayer of thanks to the former drug dealer whose small army of armed thugs is “protecting” our little island of modest prosperity amid the sea of anarchy and confusion that is present-day Los Angeles. (He stopped by, like a politician trolling for votes, to shake hands and taste the pumpkin pies, a handgun prominently holstered at his side.)

Are they aware, I wondered, of the blocks of charred ruins, not three miles distant, that were once pleasant and peaceful Valley neighborhoods like this one, set ablaze in a pique of frustration-fueled rage? Are they not cognizant of the local city college parking lot two blocks away, jammed with cars – Hummers, SUVs, Mercedes, every kind of vehicle imaginable – out of gas and now serving as the semi-permanent residences of their many occupants? Did they think that government-funded food giveaways and jobs programs would long serve as the new status quo in a city of sixteen million restless people, if that is still our number?

I think we are falling asleep again, that we’ve shifted the baseline down without realizing it and accepted it as the new normal. People have taken to driving again, though a little more providently. They rideshare – except when they don’t, claiming that public transportation (or even the Smart Jitneys) are too unreliable and inconvenient to meet their needs.

The crisis has passed? No. It’s barely begun.

So, like the Andersons before me, I am turning over the keys and contents of my estate to the neighborhood. I’ve urged them to use my library (I collected books all of my life) and the house to continue the school I started several weeks ago, the one that became my new livelihood in the World Without Oil. I’ve donated my hand tools to the neighborhood co-op.

I look around me tonight, and it all seems like a dream, a thirty-year-long phantom existence that will vanish in the morning. I will let it go.

Tomorrow I will don my “walk-out” pack and make my way down to Union Station where I hope that the outrageous bribe I have paid to secure a seat on a train headed east will in fact have secured my passage. I can’t be certain, but I can hope that within a few days – or maybe it will take weeks, who knows? – I will once again be greeted and taken in by my family and by the loving smile of my precious daughter, welcoming her prodigal father home.

2007-05-28T11:50:00.000-07:00

World Without Oil: Shakey

In Los Angeles, as you may have heard, the ground occasionally shakes.

If it shakes long enough and hard enough, buildings topple to the ground. Structures collapse. But if it just shakes a little bit, things sway back and forth for a few seconds, then the shaking slows and the swaying gradually settles; maybe a glass will wiggle its way off a shelf or a pencil will roll off a tabletop. Lamps suspended from ceilings will swing pendulum-like and then slow to a halt.

Just a little adjustment, and then the earth is solid and firm again. Within a day or two, people will have forgotten that they live in a place where the ground occasionally shakes.

Sometimes, though, an earthquake is more like a swift jolt, a sharp slap and then a violent rocking, and buildings and structures will do a sudden quick two-step sideways and then attempt to recover from being knocked off-balance. Sometimes it works, but sometimes they shift on their moorings. Maybe they don’t collapse, or they start to collapse but then something will catch in mid-fall, and the structure – weakened, unstable, off-kilter – will yet remain standing, though a floor be caved in or a wall pulled apart and angled strangely.

Subsequently, the structure will be inspected and red-tagged, meaning it’s no longer fit for safe habitation. What the sudden jolt started, workmen will have to complete.

That’s sort of the way I look back on this Oil Crisis: the structure has been knocked slightly off of its foundation, its corners are somewhat askew, but not enough yet to be red-tagged as unfit for human habitation.

Things are out of alignment, but you might just want to think of them as “re-adjusted” or “re-aligned.” The structure isn’t completely solid anymore – in fact, the crisis has revealed some of its profound inner weaknesses and inherent faults. The next large quake may very well stress those beyond endurance and then the structure will collapse – but not yet.

I’ve remarked before that people in Los Angeles live with this stuff every day – they laugh, they shrug their shoulders, and go on about their business as if nothing happened. Ha ha, they say. Potential disaster is a way of life in L.A.

So you will note that, despite the picture I’ve managed to paint of my life and somewhat reduced circumstances in what would seem to be the alternate reality of a World Without Oil, gasoline is still being offered to the consuming public at the newly available and, for some, eminently affordable price of $5.62 per gallon. You don’t even have to wait in long lines to get it at this point, as you did during the summer. If you can pay for it, you can have some.

What was it when it was at its highest? $6.00 a gallon? $7.00? Huh, I can’t even remember. How about that?

Same deal with food. Store shelves, especially in the fresh produce and meat and dairy sections, were empty during many weeks of the very long hot summer; and when the stuff was there, it was obscenely expensive. It still is, but those who can afford to pay, pay. And eat. The shortages at the start (and middle) of this crisis were exacerbated by hoarding, which got some people through the worst of it, and will probably continue to get people through the winter. Some people. The people who can afford to make such arrangements.

I need to say that I am one of those people who can afford to make such arrangements.

If I wanted to, I could go out and fill ‘er up again and tool about the city (well, some parts of the city, the safe parts) with impunity in my little Honda Civic, which has sat empty in my garage since the crisis began. I could switch on my electricity and fire up the old TV set, re-subscribe to cable and my Internet service, and just start consuming fossil fuels with wild abandon all over again, at substantially higher costs, of course. I don’t really have to keep turning the compost, saving out seeds, putting in the next round of cold weather crops for a mid-winter to early spring harvest of beets, turnips, broccoli, peas and potatoes. These things will be available, we are assured, in the stores this winter – if you can afford them. And I can.

My point is that it is possible to pretend now that the situation has stabilized. After a period of rigorous demand destruction (for reasons that are still suspiciously unknown), supply has apparently once again reached an accord with demand in the form of a price people are willing to pay and at which oil companies, refineries and distributors can continue to thrive, though one suspects the hidden hand of government subsidies at work behind the scenes.

Banks, credit card companies and mortgage lenders have scrambled to deal with a tidal wave of defaults and foreclosures; many losers have sunk beneath the surface, but a few innovative winners have bobbed up to the top, gasping for air but still treading the waters of economic activity. The stock market has collapsed and rebounded several times in the last few months, slipping always to a lower plateau of pricing to achieve some footing of stability – but overvalued stocks are still being traded back and forth daily. Lots of activity in the commodities markets, I understand. Fortunes are being made – in somewhat substantially devalued dollars. Falling imports have apparently improved the balance of trade deficit, but in doing so have destabilized a now faltering international economy.

But the reality is that, here at home, some substantial portion of the population has quite simply disappeared from view in this new pretend world. Maybe it’s the part that can’t afford to log onto the Internet or show up in front of the TV cameras at the almost daily demonstrations in front of City Hall. They’re the newly-made “invisibles”, unemployed, dispossessed and, I suspect, increasingly desperate.

The Andersons, that nice couple I wrote about here awhile ago, are members of this new class. Where’d they go after they walked away from their nice suburban house, one of several here on my block that has been repeatedly looted and ransacked? Back to their parents’ place? Or the relocation camps, perhaps? Maybe they’ve become a part of that vast army of the homeless living under Los Angeles bridges that is predicted to overwhelm the social service agencies and rescue missions this winter. Very few people speak of them, but they’re out there. I see them everywhere I go. They occasionally raid our gardens. We give them food to make them go away; someday we may have to employ the services of our local warlord to accomplish that purpose.

The truth is, we are all continuing to live inside a fossil fuel-based System that is teetering just this side of being red-tagged. The next price quake, be it a season of foul weather (who can know what winter woes climate change will bring us this year?) or some new international version of petroleum blackmail or nuclear roulette – we’re living in a structure that’s just this close to being condemned. “But see,” we tell ourselves and point and smile with pride, “it’s still standing!”

Ha ha.

2007-05-26T07:59:00.000-07:00

World Without Oil: Doing What Needs To Be Done

I realize, in reading over what I posted recently, that I may have conveyed the impression that we were only “saved” here after the guns finally came out – which is, I’m afraid, a pretty typical American formulation, the Good Guys versus the Bad Guys and all that. We have a lot of guns in this country, it’s true, and a frontier tradition of sorts that provides a context for pulling them out and using them as an argument of last resort. Or, in the case of Iraq, as an argument for preemptive action.

But no, it was not the Gunfight at the North Hollywood Corral that saved our collective ass here. That was just the one event that actually seemed to galvanize people locally, to pull them up out of the stupor that was the terminal state of oil addiction cold turkey. By the time it had done so, many were in pretty dire financial straits, having borrowed deeply into a hole from which it seemed impossible to extricate themselves.

That horror, combined with the daily terror in the streets, was driving many people further and further into isolation, as if hiding the condition was the only thing that could bring them solace. Some of them were even still indoors watching TV or surfing the ‘Net (when the power was on) while we were out working in the community gardens, begging for their participation and help, and minions of the banking industry were knocking at their front doors with eviction notices in hand. In some cases I know of, one or two people were even turning their guns on themselves.

During this time as well, inflated currency on credit was being offered at staggeringly low interest rates by both the central banks and the consumer sector institutions in a desperate attempt to keep the whole System afloat. That effort is still underway and, given the fact that it is coupled with a complex of competing (and confusing) schemes of energy rationing at many levels of government, the System (that World That Can Afford Oil that I referred to before) appears to be still in operation. That is, if you don’t look too closely.

What is actually in play is the first phase of a Great Contraction, as evidenced here in Los Angeles by what MsGeek (hi, Michelle – yes, I’m still alive) has elsewhere referred to as Red and Green Zones. I think that Green Zones can be characterized as places with either a) the money and/or political connections to obtain oil and the products of oil, or b) the community necessary to provide what oil cannot. It’s my contention that the Green Zones in the first category will eventually turn a bright glowing Red but, for the moment, the levitation trick appears to still be working.

In the meantime, what has happened locally is that larger and larger connected groups have formed to foster regional productivity on all levels premised on the minimal availability of declining energy supplies and the maximum availability of human capital in the immediate vicinity. That’s a fancy way of saying that, block by block, unemployed people have set up local job boards listing their skills evaluated in terms of an alternate currency we call VALS (for “Value” but it could also be construed as “Valley” given our location.)

VALS are accepted by everyone who signs on to the system. Geographically, it necessarily has to remain a small system. Signing on means that you agree to accept the standards by which we evaluate the skills you have to offer, and those serve as a basis for negotiation with whoever needs your particular skill. I’m paying for this hook-up time with VALS. They also translate into trades for tangible goods. When you go to the local farmers markets (and there are some now), you can see things priced in taxable dollars ($6.50 for a loaf of bread!) or in VALS. By the time government figures out that it wants to collect tax on these transactions (which are currently perfectly legal, but we’ve not exactly asked for their permission), that System will probably have collapsed anyway.

It was slow going at first, getting this thing up and running. There was much discussion and disagreement over what things were actually worth, but since negotiation is an integral part of the process, the kinks eventually work themselves out. What you put in, you get back out again. It evolved out of the barter system and required a certain widespread level of acceptance before it really started to fire on all four cylinders, but it does finally appear to be working.

We knew it had hit a certain stride when one of the local warlords (yes, there are still gang turf wars going on) began accepting his bribes in VALS. Hey, you do what you gotta do, you know?

2007-05-25T17:00:00.000-07:00

World Without Oil: Coming Up for Air

What, you may wonder, just happened?

Actually, I think a lot of people are re-surfacing about now, shaking their heads, looking around, dazed, surveying the landscape and asking just that question. What did happen, really?

It’s like after a storm passes through in the night: there’s crap everywhere, blown about by powerful winds – some trees and power lines are down and everything got a pretty good soaking. But essentially, things are still standing, if a bit shakily. The lights may not be on, but the sun’s out. And best of all, you’re still alive and it’s a new day, another in which to try to make your way in the world.

It’s been a good ten weeks or so (I’ve lost count) since I’ve been able to do much except try to figure out not just how to stay alive from one day to the next, but how to plan on staying alive in the months and years to come. And I was, as it now seems clear to me, somewhat better prepared than a lot of my neighbors; but still, it has been a lot of hard work and, for a short period of time there, just plain dangerous from day-to-day.

There are a lot of stories to be told. I tried to keep a journal, but some days got lost in the press of everything else that needed to get done. Without any immediate or reliable access to internet or phone connections, communications were restricted to essential correspondence with family and friends many miles distant. To my amazement, the postal service still delivers, if seldom in a timely manner.

But we have survived. What I can say at this point is that, in the five or six weeks immediately following my last post, my neighborhood became engulfed in some sort of turf battle between competing gangs that were attempting to strong arm local merchants (and residents as well) into “protection” contracts, given the lack of reliability of response by a badly overwhelmed police department.

These new racketeers had apparently also assumed control of some essential black market supply lines in our area. It was like something out of the Old West or Prohibition Era Chicago. There were literally shoot-outs (one of them, a block away from my house, featured what sounded like a small arsenal of automatic weapons fire, lasting a good twenty minutes or so) and fire bombings of local businesses.

I used to read the news, or hear reports of gang violence in South Central Los Angeles – at least a couple of murders every week, week after week – and I never really related to how ordinary people must feel in a situation like that, how they cope. Now I get it.

Night time was the worst, but it got so bad that the streets emptied during the daylight hours as well, with the threat of violence always hanging in the air, violence that could explode out into the open at any hour. We stopped sending the Watch out – it was just too dangerous, and no one was really looking to go up against thugs possibly armed with automatics.

But there came a night when a gang of a dozen or so looters swept down our street, attempting to break into houses, setting things on fire. The local militia (members of the Watch who carried guns) had just simply had enough, I guess, and swarmed out into the street suddenly and opened fire. I was not among them, I hesitate to add. They actually killed a guy and wounded a couple of others, and I thought, “Well, there goes the neighborhood.”

But, as it turned out, that was pretty much the straw that broke the camel’s back. People who’d been huddled inside their houses for weeks behind closed doors, terrified by what they perceived as a world gone mad around them, at that moment just decided to stop being afraid. I don’t know if it was the right thing to do or not. It could very well have backfired and brought the wrath of the gangs down on our heads in some act of massive retaliation.

But it didn’t. In fact it got people motivated to reach out to each other again, and to the local business community, the parts of it that hadn’t closed up shop and departed. It inspired them to get organized in ways that we had only half-heartedly tried before. And eventually, it made us stronger.

Without going into the details, here’s what I think happened: when this crisis first hit, people refused to believe it. They just thought, “Well, you know, it’s just the price of gas. I mean, it’s high, but it’s been high before, and we got through it. It’ll come down again. The situation will right itself.”

What they didn’t understand, of course, was that in “righting” itself, it would have to balance a new equation: that oil, and therefore refined gasoline, would always and forever after be less available and therefore more and more expensive, and that that increasing price would ripple through everything, as long as everything was connected in some way to oil.

And the mainstream media did not seek to disabuse them of this notion that it was only about driving – because, of course, mainstream media plays to a culture that is all about driving and the economic activity it supports. So, keep people amused (and driving) and keep trying to sell them stuff, but don’t really tell them what they absolutely need to hear.

When the shortages hit, they hit fast, one right after another. The train kept coming off the rails, then “righting” itself, then coming off again. A little demand destruction would create a bit of a surplus, a “breather”, if you like – which would then be followed by the next round of price increases.

I don’t know where that damn train is now; I'm not even sure there are rails in place anymore. My impression, however, is that, as a society, we’ve now been artificially separated into two realms, one With Oil, inhabited by those who can still afford it (probably with a little collusion on the part of government and the “essential” services of the Department of Defense) and one Without Oil, inhabited by those who either cannot afford it or have chosen to restrict their use of it.

Occupying the border between those two regions are the camps, the Homeland Security “Relocation Centers.” They proffer, to those who take them up on it, a source of housing, security, a steady supply of government surplus protein and other stored foods, and some modified form of debt amnesty for suburban refugees. In return, I suspect, they demand manual labor or other services at “reduced” wages. I don’t know for sure; I’m just guessing on the basis of rumor.

How do you pay for all of this, you ask, and still keep some semblance of an economy going, let alone a state or national government?

Why, you inflate the currency, of course! Like mad. You flood the marketplace with steadily more and more worthless pieces of paper. At first it makes people think, “Hey! I’m rich! Look at all this paper I’ve got!” But then, prices go up accordingly and sooner or later they outrun your stack of paper. Suddenly, you’ve got a lot of paper, but in terms of what it’ll actually buy, stuff of any real value, you’re broke.

I think that’s what’s happening now, though I can’t be certain because I just don’t have access to that kind of information anymore – sources that are reliable, that is. I don’t really know who to believe. I trust what I can see around me, and what I see are steadily rising prices. And I think I also see people finally (finally!) waking up to the idea that they are going to have to fix this mess themselves; that government, which is off playing “let’s pretend” with the currency in its own little sector, is not about to lend a helping hand unless you’re willing to relocate.

Those of us who have survived and are now attempting to deal with life in the World Without Oil sector are on our own. We will become our own governments, with our own systems of money and trade and agonistic politics, our own ways of doing things and assigning value to what we do. Because neither the relocation camps nor the World That Can Afford Oil that supports them can ultimately be sustained.

2007-05-14T09:18:00.000-07:00

World Without Oil: Your Services Will No Longer Be Required

Had to happen I guess. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. After all, I work (worked?) in the entertainment business, on the computer side, in games. Could there be a livelihood any more marginal in the grand scheme of the fossil fuel-driven economy, any more dependent on the existence of discretionary income than online computer games? Who now, aside from the very very rich, has any discretionary income to spend on such things as persistent virtual worlds? Aren’t the problems of one real world enough? Anyway, given the erratic supply of electricity in the real world, “persistent” is now truly a misnomer.

I will say, though, that our team managed to finish the game and delivered it on time to the large media company that I worked for, under the most trying of circumstances. Management thanked us, and sent us all on our way, and closed down our division. They aren’t even worried about the repercussions of not giving notice or offering severance. All of that has gone away, and everybody knows it. I think they will probably just take our game and put it on a shelf somewhere – until the economics improve. I wonder when that will be? Since work is where I posted from these last few weeks, this may indeed be my last for a while.

Li and her husband, some friends of mine from work, live on a boat in the marina. They’re weighing anchor tomorrow morning, and heading on up north, following the coastline. They’re prepared to travel in this way for months if they have to, until they find an acceptable and safe harbor. They kindly offered to take me with them, but I declined. I wonder again, did I make the right choice?

I have to be honest here: the city around us is in a state of chaos, and the chaos is closing in fast. The patient is running an extremely high fever, and I have no idea whether we’re going to make it or not. I suspect that we started too late to prepare, that the deck was stacked against us from the beginning and that anything we do now or have done will serve only as a stopgap measure until the conflagration sweeps our way, discovers us and burns through like a wildfire in the chaparral. Fire in the chapparal, by the way, is a perfectly natural and necessary part of its lifecycle.

The truth is that there are just too many of us in this place, trying to get by with too few essential skills and resources. The supporting networks are breaking down as the city contracts. I’m certain there are other people out there, elsewhere, who are better defended and will survive the chaos, but I am no longer certain that we can number ourselves among them.

Someday people will settle down again in this place, will farm beside its rivers and harvest its bounty as the Tataviam, the Tongva and the Chumash did here for hundreds of years before us. On certain days, after a heavy rain has cleared the air during the night and the morning sun shines brightly on the surrounding hills, you can see the crisp clean edge of this place and sense the enormous promise and abundant beauty of this desert valley. But we have overrun it, leached it of its vitality, drained it of its fragile economy, careless of the ways in which it circulated its energies. Will it forgive us? Will it allow us to become a part of it again, if we can find our place? Or will it rebalance the dynamic of its equation without us?

My walk-out pack stands in the corner, ready should the situation warrant. I have a destination in mind, not too far away, where I may be able to weather this storm for a little while at least, if luck is on my side. And perhaps I will be able to return – but what will I find here if I do?

Stay safe, everyone. Stay alive.

P.S. - Is anyone else hearing rumors about these camps opening up that were built by Homeland Security to house refugees after Katrina? My advice: don’t go.

2007-05-13T14:25:00.000-07:00

World Without Oil: Harvest

I used to be such a newshound. Now the only news that really matters to me is local. Is there still a War on Terror? Are we still in Iraq? How’s that globalization project working out for us? I hear we invaded Canada (for their tar sands, apparently). Then I heard we didn’t.

When the CSA I’m subscribed to down near San Diego, the only one even remotely close to Los Angeles, cancels its local deliveries because it says it can no longer honor its commitments due to rising fuel prices, that’s news.

When the Sunday morning farmer’s markets in Studio City and Hollywood were shuttered (they would sell out within minutes, even while charging exorbitant prices for fresh fruits and vegetables) because the farmers said they could keep more of what they earned by selling out of their farms than by driving the miles and miles to get to the city, that’s news.

I’d like to keep you up to date on what’s going on here (since I seem to be the only on-the-ground reporter at this location), but since the Los Angeles Times stopped publication of anything other than its online edition (and cut its staff by half) and given the high probability of a random power outage at any hour of the day or night, the “news” consists of the big echo chamber that is the Internet, when I can get to it. I don’t have access to TV anymore, but my impression is, TV lies anyway so why pay attention? Is anything even on anymore?

Let me say that, from where I sit, state and local government has failed miserably in dealing with this crisis. Only within the past couple of weeks have I seen evidence that they have risen above partisan political bickering to actually try to do something, and it strikes me as too little, too late. The City Council voted to lift restrictions on what constitutes public transportation. In other words, they’ve instituted a “Smart Jitney” system (you can read about here) that actually managed to somewhat ameliorate the transportation problem that is huge here now. The only trouble is, the irregular supply of electricity that collapses the Internet and phone systems plays havoc with its reliability. So how long can that work, I wonder?

Defining the nature of the problem seems to have been the biggest problem; and now they are simply being overwhelmed by citizen protests and outright lawlessness in some quarters. Police and National Guard are trying to maintain order (that is, establish perimeters to protect or cordon off certain areas), while the rich seem to have hired private armies of security forces to do the same. But, honestly, the actual reliable reports on that are now few and far between.

I have no doubt that there are some in local agencies who are attempting to do the best they can (teachers and school administrators essentially sent a big eff-you to the LAUSD when it sought to end the school year early), but let’s face it: you can’t think straight when your day is filled with fear and loathing, with no end in sight and no sign of intelligent leadership on the horizon, bringing the cavalry of salvation with it. Only email from my family in the Midwest (and my daughter who has joined them there) brings me any news I can trust, and on that score, all appears to be as well as can be expected. They persevere, as do I.

Here’s something else that I’ve noticed locally: people are moving in from the suburbs in a mass exodus. Housing around here is going through the roof. Apartment and condo availability is zero, so people are sub-letting and opening up their houses to boarders like crazy. I have a feeling that this is both a good thing and a bad thing. For us, it means more mouths to feed.

Soon, all systems will be stressed past the breaking point if people don’t radically change their mode of thinking and their way of conducting their lives. But it has always been the case that this is a question of changing cultural values, which is why I guess it was so hard for politicians to get a handle on this. They thought it was just about politics.

And now for the really local news:

Not far from where I live, there’s a big open field. Nineteen acres of fenced-off property, one of the biggest stretches of privately-owned contiguous land that isn’t some sort of a park in the Valley. Do you recall that scene in American Grafitti where the guys go visit Wolfman Jack, broadcasting from a radio station late at night? Well, that radio station sits on this property (though it’s no longer used as a broadcasting studio or a movie set), along with three huge transmitter towers that once beamed signal out to the world at 50000 watts. Now the towers are silent. I’ve often wondered if they could be equipped with windmills and turbines, but that’s another tale for another time.

The deal is, the big media corporation that owns (owned?) this field and those towers would come along every couple of months and hire some guy on a tractor to cut down all the weeds. One day there’s a nice stretch of wild habitat, full of high grasses hiding the field mice, snakes, insects and lizards, with hawks and ravens circling lazily overhead to keep the population in check – and the next, it was all mowed flat.

But not this year. Due, no doubt, to the continuing drought, the weeds did not grow to their usual abundance this past spring, so the semi-annual mowing did not occur. And, of course, with the present troubles, no tractor can now be hired to do the job. Mowing weeds is the least of our worries. So nature has taken over and provided us with a nice healthy crop of wild buckwheat which we harvested and threshed.

Then we hooked up a grain mill I’d purchased a while ago from Lehman's to an old exercise bike I’d kept in the garage for some reason, the kind that has that big heavy flywheel on the front. There’s an old guy down the street, a sort of jack-of-all-trades who’s good at jury-rigging this sort of thing (I’m terrible at it), and before too long, we had sacks and sacks of buckwheat flour that we handed out at the neighborhood meeting. It’s pretty bland stuff, but it’ll do in a pinch.

We’ve been harvesting for weeks now. I’d started early with some of my cool weather crops (sweet peas, lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, turnips and potatoes), but the neighborhood’s new gardens are coming along nicely as well, full of corn, beans, tomatoes, peppers and squash. Peaches, plums and grapes are ripening slowly. There has been some vandalism, but for the most part, we seem to have been spared the roving gangs of looters that have so plagued some sections of Los Angeles. (Someone did do a pretty thorough job of cleaning out the Anderson place, though.)

We have to be careful and ration what we’ve got, and save out seeds for the next round of planting. Food deliveries at local stores, thanks to truckers’ strikes, are extremely random and prices are out of sight, so the supplemental vegetables (why does there always seem to be a surplus of zucchini?) are welcomed by everyone. The black market provides the rest. We found someone two blocks over who raises chickens, so we trade for eggs; a couple of people have also acquired some rabbits, but I don’t think anybody has gotten desperate enough to slaughter any of them for protein yet. We use them for the excellent fertilizer they produce.

I don’t want to make it sound as if I’m the Master Gardener here. I have been doing it for a while, but I’m still pretty much a novice, especially when it comes to growing bio-intensive. The Israelis on the block, on the other hand, are the winners in the “grow the most vegetables per square foot” contest. You can thank the kibbutzim for that, I guess.

Tonight, a group of us got together and shared a meal outside as the sun set – someone had used their flour to make some pancakes, and though they lacked something in the way of sweetness, the texture alone was a treat. Someone else brought out a CD player, and a couple of bottles of wine were opened and emptied during the course of the evening. We set up out in the middle of the street (and raised a toast to Mrs. S_____) and danced in the dark beneath the stars, uninterrupted by traffic (there hasn’t been any for days), until the batteries died.

2007-05-12T17:46:00.000-07:00

World Without Oil: Back to the Garden

Posting while the power's on here at work. Mine's out again at home.

Los Angeles is, at this late date, the last place in the world anyone would associate with the concept of agriculture. In the minds of most people, it is the city of the freeway, given over entirely to the automobile, the metropolis of cement and steel and urban sprawl.

And yet, not even a century ago, Los Angeles was a city promoted and sold as a land of prodigiously prolific agricultural fertility, a land of citrus and walnuts and almond and avocado groves, of beanfields and strawberry patches and truck farms as far as the eye could see, a city whose lifestyle was intimately interwoven with its surrounding ranches and farmlands.

Gradually the city overtook the farms and the orchards and paved them over, or acquired and subdivided them into suburban housing tracts, industrial “parks” and shopping complexes, strung together with a web of freeways. I live in one of those mid-century San Fernando Valley housing developments; hard to believe, but in the late nineteenth century, where my house now sits was in the middle of the largest wheat-growing operation in North America. No wheat grows here today.

In the battle between the fossil fuel-driven expansionist impulse and the desire to grow and eat food locally, food lost. The last engagement in this battle was fought almost a year ago over fourteen acres of cultivated land in South Central Los Angeles.

The South Central Farm was land that Mayor Bradley had loaned to the L.A. Regional Food Bank, a non-profit welfare agency, after the Rodney King riots of 1992. It was land that had been seized by the city under eminent domain in 1986, then had later been sold to the Los Angeles Harbor Department which extended a permit to the Food Bank to operate the property, a former factory site, as a community garden.

What began as a couple of city blocks of weed-choked toxic soil that was essentially used as a dumping ground eventually became, within a matter of a few years, a lush oasis of some 350 garden plots farmed by low income families from the surrounding neighborhoods.

The district itself was a heavily-trafficked industrial complex of warehouses and distribution centers serving the Port of Los Angeles via the truck and train routes of the Alameda Corridor, block after block of the sort of soul-killing utilitarian environment we seem to be so good at creating, miles of barbed wire and chainlink fence with nary a tree or a park or an open plaza of public space to be found. Housing in the area is sort of an afterthought.

But there, in the middle of the asphalt and the cement, arose a garden, the largest community garden in North America, whose farmers grew not only the usual array of vegetables for their home tables but also reintroduced exotic plants into their diets representing some of the original native foodstuffs and medicinal herbs of Mesoamerica. It was an island of green, when looked at from above, in an ocean of gray.

Then the original owner of the land decided he wanted it back – to build yet another warehouse. The eminent domain decree under which the land had been acquired in the first place allowed him the right to re-purchase. The farmers, who in fact had no strictly legal right to be there, stood their ground and occupied the farm, but their efforts were in vain. After a string of legal defeats and a prolonged confrontation with sheriffs armed with an eviction notice, the gardens were finally bulldozed and demolished last July, the soil scraped clean of that year’s potential harvest, a treasure lost.

Does it seem so far-fetched to believe that this place, this city, with its wealth, its abundance of resources, its Mediterranean climate, its year-round growing season, could once again become a center of urban agriculture? We currently use our resources to grow grass and decorative flowers and ornamental bushes, and reserve huge amounts of land to make room for our automobiles: roads, driveways, parking lots and parking spaces, little houses (garages) to shelter them from the elements. But the chances are very good that we’re not going to be able to use those vehicles as much anymore, that the remaining supplies of gas and oil will be rationed and re-allocated for essential services – or for fighting wars to secure more reserves.

There are people in this city – not many, but a few: The Usual Suspects, I call them – who foresaw that this day would arrive, who perceived this need early on and have been working towards the goal of restoring urban agriculture here for some time now. I am thinking about organizations like Fallen Fruit, like FarmLab, like the Los Angeles Eco-Village, like Path to Freedom or these folks. Given the nature of the crisis we face, they are starting to get a hearing. In the battle between food and concrete, food is beginning to reclaim its rightful place in the scheme of Los Angeles.

This afternoon, a couple of my neighbors and I demolished a wall and de-paved a patio to give us more contiguous space in which to garden. This is my dream, my plan. I envision a time when I will one day be able to look out my front window and see not a street full of cars, but a field full of vegetables and fruit trees and flowers, edible perennials alive with pollinating bees and butterflies – and a pathway among them to my neighbors.

2007-05-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

World Without Oil: Stay or Go?

The Andersons, a young married couple in their early thirties, left this past week. Piled everything into their van, turned the keys to their house over to their neighbor and drove away. I don't know where they were headed. I don’t think they’re planning on coming back. I hope they make it. This weekend we're going to dig up their backyard and plant another garden. We should be able to get some sort of a harvest out before the bank forecloses, given the pace of such things these days.

More neighborhood meetings this week. Of course, I went back; I couldn't afford not to. It was another instance of the question I've been wrestling with since the beginning.

Many tales of woe. I can’t believe how many people were living off of credit cards and the cashed-in equity of their homes. When this thing first started, this crisis, I somehow knew it wasn’t going to pass quickly. Something just told me that this was it, that the moment had arrived. Others, even some of the people within my local network, the people I like to refer to as The Usual Suspects (because I’d always see them at the same events I was attending, and I gradually got to know some of them personally) – even those folks continued to debate back and forth as to whether this was that moment, the start of the great collapse, the unwinding of our fossil fuel-driven economy.

I went through the denial and depression stages pretty fast. Within a couple of days, actually (see my first couple of posts.) And then I started to formulate my plan. I won’t go into the details, but as a starting point, it involved spending down a lot of capital I’d saved in order to purchase tools (of the non-electric sort), seeds and other supplies. I took time off from work to do it, to catch up on preparations I’d been putting off, literally, for years. The surprising thing to me was that I seemed to be alone in making these kinds of arrangements. (In Los Angeles. This guy in Australia seemed to get it.)

Then I parked my car in my garage, siphoned the remaining gas out of the tank, and haven’t driven it since. People have broken into the garage several times, only to be disappointed. I also paid off my credit cards and cancelled just about everything I’d subscribed to for years, including my internet service. This is being posted from my jobsite. And that may go soon. Cash only from here on out, until the barter economy kicks in.

Then I went around the house unplugging everything, turning off all of the “always on” appliances. My spare time went into my garden, into reading up on survival techniques and making some alternative water supply arrangements. I’d included myself in the new plan at my job that allowed my team to work from home most days; and as time went on, it became more and more dangerous to even ride my bike the couple of miles to work and back. Lately there have been a growing number of anecdotal accounts of bicycles as well as cars being hijacked.

The last thing I did was prepare my “walk out” backpack and supplies, though it should perhaps have been the first thing on my list. I put it off because I really didn’t want to deal with the question that I was still wrestling with last week: should I stay or should I go?

Should I just walk away from everything I’ve built up over the last thirty years, my home, my garden, my friends and associates, my job? Or should I stay and try to maintain as much of it as I can through this period of volatile instability? And if everything collapses around me, will I eventually regret having made the choice to remain here, trapped, isolated, thousands of miles from the other members of my immediate family?

I kept telling myself at every step of the way that I could still hop on a plane at a moment’s notice and be back with my family (and my daughter). But I would always be looking to the west with regret, curious to know what might have happened had I stayed. There was so much to lose. Time seems to have sped up, and as it did so, the options for escape narrowed. Last week, the incident with the guns brought the problem into much sharper focus, and I realized that I was as addicted as everyone else around me. I can't leave.

By the same token, I can’t go through this alone. I need to be able to trust my neighbors, but we’re not on the same page. Most of them still think this is going to pass: somebody somewhere is going to fix this situation and restore their lives to their previous condition, their former level of affluence and comfort. But the situation itself is changing us.

There is a paradigm shift taking place, but it needs to happen faster, because we’re racing against a clock. What we have, on a practical level, is a design problem; we have to quickly re-arrange the way we live, and we’ve got to start now. I’m convinced we can do it, but not if a previous mode of thinking prevents us from even recognizing the problem. And it won’t make much difference if I’m the only one doing it, because, as I said, it just won’t work without these other people.

We’re all in rehab together, forced to try to kick this habit but still desperately looking to do just one more line or take just one last sip of that drink. Many people are still trying to fill up their gas tanks and keep driving, piling on the debt in order to do it. Some of them absolutely have to. My hope is that the paroxysms, the convulsions and hallucinations, the nausea and the agony of going cold turkey off of cheap energy pass quickly so that we can all get down to the serious business of creating some new way to conduct our lives as a community.

2007-05-09T09:10:00.000-07:00

World Without Oil: Terra Incognita

Shots were fired in the neighborhood last night. I’d just gotten up to take my watch shift shortly before four in the morning when I heard them, three brief pops echoing in rapid succession from halfway down the block. I was out the door within seconds, but it was still dark, and the street had fallen silent. There was the scent of acrid smoke in the air, and a red glow to the southeast, where Griffith Park was still burning.

Lights were coming on up and down the block, when suddenly someone came charging across the front yards, straight toward my front porch. I could see that he was staggering, struggling to hold onto a large gas can. “Drop it!” I shouted, and that brought him up short. He dropped the can and stumbled off up the next door neighbor’s driveway. I heard him throw himself over the fence in the backyard as Max and Andy came running towards me. Max had a flashlight that flickered across the ground in front of him.

“Where’d he go?” they panted. “Backyard,” I said, but clearly none of us wanted to give chase. “Was that gunfire?”

“I don’t know,” replied Max, still struggling to get his breath. “I didn’t see it.” Andy had reached down to pick up the gas can. The cap had popped off when it hit the ground, and only a little bit of the remaining gas sloshed about inside. As the flashlight played across its metal surface, I could see dark wet blotches on it. Andy dropped the can quickly. There was blood on his hand.

“I caught the guy coming out of Smith’s garage, saw him coming out the driveway. Then he spots me and the next thing I know, he’s firing.”

“Is that your blood or his?” I asked.

“His, I guess. He didn’t hit me.”

“I didn’t see a gun on him.”

“He might have dropped it,” added Max. “We’d better go look for it.”

Up and down the street, some people were cautiously poking their heads out their front doors. Other houses, where lights had been on just a moment before, were now dark. Whatever it was, people who were safe in their homes, even if they were curious, assumed it was being taken care of. They probably wouldn’t sleep the rest of the night, but as long as we were out here, “handling it”, they were content to remain behind locked doors.

“Shouldn’t we report this to the police? Let them look for the gun?” I asked.

“Really?” Andy threw back over his shoulder. “You think they’d come?” Somewhere off in the night, I heard sirens wailing. I realized that I’d gotten used to hearing sirens at all hours of the day and night. No, I didn’t think they’d come. What’s more, I didn’t think Andy wanted them to come.

When we got down to the Smith place, the owner was just emerging from his garage, quickly pulling the door closed behind him. We’d checked all the yards and bushes along the path the thief had taken, but had come up empty-handed. We searched all the bushes around the house; still, no gun. Smith remained on guard near the door to his garage as we did so. It was apparent to me that he didn’t want us checking out whatever it was he had stashed in there – probably gasoline, but maybe food and water as well. He thanked us profusely, then briskly wished us a good night.

“Maybe we should retrace our steps?” Andy remarked as Max bid us good night as well and returned to his house. I could see Tim headed our way, ready to take Max’s place. “What’s the point?” I asked. “I thought we agreed: no guns.”

“What are you talking about? The guy fired at me!”

“Three shots at close range, and he missed? But that’s his blood on the gas can? It doesn’t make sense. Where’s the gun?”

By this time, Tim had joined us. “What’s going on?” he asked, clearly oblivious to what had occurred.

“Where is it?” I persisted. “Where’s the gun?” Andy looked long and hard at me, then, throwing a glance in Tim’s direction, he pulled the handgun out from under his shirt in back.

“Get real, man. Don’t you watch the news? This city’s coming apart at the seams. It was only a matter of time, and now it’s happening. It’s up to us to defend ourselves. Nobody’s gonna do it for us.”

“How long have you been carrying that with you?” I asked.

“Since we started.” I looked to Tim, who didn’t seem particularly shocked by this revelation. “And you?” I asked. He pulled out his handgun as well. “Do you own a weapon?” he asked.

“No. I don’t. And I wouldn’t know what to do with it if I did.”

“We can teach you,” said Tim. “You’re going to need it.”

“No,” I said. “No, I’m not. And honestly, I don’t want to be out here with you cowboys if you’re going to be carrying loaded weapons.”

“You know damn well we’re on our own here. How do you propose we stop these guys from taking what’s ours?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have that plan. But what are you guys going to do if they turn out to be better shots – or just better equipped?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, but for the time being,” Andy replied, “I feel a whole lot safer with this thing than without it. And so should you. Good night.”

I suppose he’s right, after all. Do I still have the luxury of taking the moral high ground, of entertaining notions of fairness and justice or a half-hearted commitment to non-violence – in the face of what’s happening tonight all over this city?

It is coming apart, you know, breaking down, balkanizing in ways that represent the worst that angry, disenfranchised people are capable of. The rich, we are told, are hiring private armies to defend themselves. The police, undermanned and overwhelmed, augmented by small contingents of National Guardsmen (they’re short of manpower due to the war), are fighting holding actions off elsewhere against the hit-and-run armies of the poor and dispossessed, organized around the firepower of established gang culture.

The rest of us are caught in the middle, trying to maintain some semblance of a normal life by day, hiding away in our houses at night. The situation hasn’t quite descended into the chaos of uncontrolled looting and wanton destruction, as it did during the King riots. But events are outrunning our ability to even react responsibly, let alone come up with some sort of considered plan of action for the longer term.

Time is contracting, grinding us down. Lines are being drawn, and then crossed, and then redrawn, and then crossed again – over and over again every day. It’s all happening too fast, faster than people can take it in, faster than they can formulate a response before the next wave knocks them over and tumbles them to the ground.

Remember how you felt on 9/11? Remember how, after that first plane had hit the tower, you thought, “Christ, yet another horror. Those poor people in New York City. I hope there aren’t too many dead. I hope I don’t know any of them.” And then the second plane hit. And then the towers collapsed. And then another plane hit the Pentagon, and another slammed into the Pennsylvania countryside, and each one ratcheted up the horror and fear and pushed you farther and farther away from any idea you might have had about what’s normal. You found yourself looking up into the clear blue morning sky and thinking, “Could death rain down on me from above today?”

It was as if normal was a receding shore. The boat that was sailing away, taking you with it, would never return to tie up at that dock again. That shore was yesterday, and the boat was sailing, full steam ahead, in the direction of a very dark and storm-tossed tomorrow, bound for terra incognita.

2007-05-08T08:01:00.000-07:00

World Without Oil: Broken Connections

Mrs. S_____ died in her sleep two nights ago.

She was discovered the next morning in her bed after someone went to check to see if she needed anything from the store. This has become a regular service provided by the Watch group: checking up to see what’s needed. We have everybody’s information, including emergency contacts. Her son, who lives in Irvine, drove up to open up the house. He seemed pretty pissed off, but once he'd settled down and taken in the situation, he was enormously grateful to us, as he himself hadn’t talked to her in a week. Without us, it might have been still another week before he made the discovery. I was a little dismayed to hear this, but tried not to let it show.

This is so very strange. I’ve lived in this neighborhood for over twenty years now, and up until a few weeks ago, I’d never traded more than a couple of words with this woman. But just two weeks ago, we’d sat together on her porch and chatted, and she’d told me about the neighborhood, along with some other things about her life.

She’d lived here for over fifty years, had watched it change, grow, slowly decline, experience a revival of sorts, decline again, and so forth. She’d even managed a small business around the corner for much of that time; but ten years ago, her health had failed. She’d suffered a broken hip in a fall, had sold the business and was pretty much housebound. At age 88, most of her friends were gone, and very few people stopped by to visit. I think she'd sort of welcomed the crisis, since it brought people back into her life.

She talked about the neighborhood, how, at one time, during the 50s, it had been a favorite of people in the music and entertainment business. On Friday nights, in the summer, they’d close down the street to traffic, drag out a record player and have music and dancing ‘til the wee hours, she’d claimed. I remarked that that seemed unbelievable. She agreed. It did indeed. Things like that don’t last forever.

It had all changed, she believed, sometime in the 60s. People seemed to get more distracted, busier; nobody stayed in one place for very long. You’d no sooner get to know someone than they’d be gone, moved out to the suburbs, transferred to some other state. Or the family would come apart.

“The Jews saved us,” she’d said with a smile. I knew what she meant. Shortly after we’d moved in, in the mid-80s, the area had been officially declared part of an Orthodox Jewish community that needed to be within walking distance of the many nearby synagogues on the Sabbath and on Holy Days. Housing prices had shot up accordingly and remained relatively high throughout the following two decades, driven in no small part by this demand. And the surrounding economic community had come to life, coalescing in numerous little specialty stores that had opened within walking distance as well – kosher bakeries, butchers, small restaurants and cafes.

It is some measure of the collapse of services we are experiencing here now to note that it took a day and a half for the funeral parlor to arrive and remove the body. The son says he doesn’t know what he’ll do with the house. He might put it on the market, or he and his family might very well be forced to take up residence there. I got the distinct impression that he is in some kind of financial difficulty. Who isn’t? He seemed to be experiencing his mother’s death with a mixture of remorse, guilt and relief; I think I hit a nerve when I remarked that I would miss her. He didn’t know quite how to react. He simply thanked me.

It’s true, though. I will miss her. A connection has been lost. Here was a woman – in many respects much like my own parents and grandparents – who had survived an early life of grinding poverty and privation in the wilds of Idaho and had experienced the multiple boom and bust cycles of affluence and economic expansion accompanying the cheap energy fiesta of the past half-century in Southern California. There was much she could have told us had anyone, including myself, bothered to listen and mine the depths of her experience. And now it is gone.

I think this is the way civilization collapses: history is silenced, as the lines of transmission between generations go down.

2007-05-06T23:22:00.000-07:00

World Without Oil: Spring Cleaning

I know it’s that time of year, but this is different. This street has never seen as many lawn and garage sales as it saw this past weekend. People are attempting to shed stuff for cash to an extent I’ve never encountered before. But the truth is, there aren’t many shoppers. The drive-buys just aren’t out in force this weekend. I’m sure people have started to conserve, and to consolidate their driving, so there was a lot of stuff that got hauled back into the house or the garage Sunday night.

Still, it was a good opportunity to walk up and down the block and chat with the neighbors. The core group of us who organized the Watch program are now looked to for some sort of leadership role; I’m not quite comfortable with it, but I guess it has to happen under the circumstances. The Watch seems to be working; we did manage to run-off one bunch of teenagers who were prowling about at three in the morning, gas cans in hand, and I rather imagine word has gotten out. The police never showed up.

What’s come out of this is that we’ve got a pretty good sense now of who is in the neighborhood and what their special needs may be; we’re in contact with each other for the first time in memory. There are not, for example, that many families with young kids. It’s an older, more-or-less working class neighborhood, with roughly two-thirds of its occupants over the age of forty. There are a fairly substantial number of retirees, and one or two really old couples who have a tough time getting around anyway. Some of us have started to do some grocery shopping for them, which isn’t that difficult since the store’s right around the corner. Though there are some holes on the shelves, there has been no run on the local shops, no panic-buying. Yet.

Some folks actually tried to get a carpool together at one point, but most people work in such far-flung locations that it really was not possible. That’s a fact of life in Los Angeles. Besides, even as crowded as it has gotten, the Orange Line is close by, and that’ll get you to the subway and light rail system if you’re trying to avoid driving places. Fares are going up, though, despite a storm of protest.

There is an eerie silence emanating from the halls of city and county government. It’s clear that there was no plan for this – earthquakes, terrorist attacks, yes. But going cold turkey off gasoline? No one foresaw it. If planning is going on now (and I assume it must be), I imagine they’re talking about enforced rationing to keep basic infrastructure going: water supply, electricity, sewage and garbage pick-up, not to mention police and fire department services and the schools.

One word of note: the permaculture lists and message boards have lit up on the ‘net. Actually, they were going fairly strong from day one of this crisis. People all over this city and elsewhere are making connections, trying to figure out what they can do to help. They’re an inspiration for me, a source of hope in the absence of government leadership.

Gasoline is still available if you’ve got the cash or the credit card to pay for it. The usual shortage phenomena are evident in some places: gas lines, fights breaking out over “topping off” and hoarding, early closures, erratic deliveries, and price changes that bounce up and down in a matter of hours – but never too far down, and always a little bit farther up. There’s still gasoline to be had, but the media are reporting that the tank is emptying fast, even though there has been significant demand destruction as a result of the excessively rapid rise in prices. People are creating their private stores of gasoline, and there have been reports of accidental explosions.

The mechanics of this shortage still aren’t making any sense to me. It’s almost as if somebody has their hand on the dial, and they just keep cranking it up, adding on the stressors to see how much pressure the system can take. The oil isn’t gone; the gasoline hasn’t vanished. It simply isn’t available in the quantities we’ve come to expect. Those who are able to pay for it are getting first dibs, at significantly higher prices. The rest of us are making do, or doing without. But a lot of people who can’t afford to do without are under increasing pressure. They’re hurting; and I get the distinct impression that the city as a whole is edging, with each rise in prices, towards an eruption.

My suggestion at that first Watch meeting that people pursue the Peak Oil topic seems to have paid off. Several people borrowed the books; we got together and watched the DVD and discussed it. Even the guy who argued with me at the first meeting says it’s better to err on the side of caution and act as if this is it. I think he went home and plugged some numbers into his monthly budget. Rumor has it that several people on the block may not be able to hold onto their homes if gas prices continue to rise, and there’s every indication that that will happen. The upshot? People are starting to plant gardens in their backyards and leave their cars in their garages. A couple of the SUVs and a Hummer are up for sale. Big surprise: there have been no takers.

I was on the phone this weekend with my daughter who is attending school back east. She’s understandably freaked out by all of this, and she wanted to come home. I told her to stay where she is and finish out the semester. I hope I made the right decision. The truth is, I don’t want her coming back here. I’m still debating whether I should be staying or not, but here I am. I think she’ll be safer back there; and if worse comes to worst, it will be easier for her to get to my family back in Ohio from where she is. I have no idea when I may see her again – or any of my family, for that matter.

Posting to this blog may not be quite as frequent in the days and weeks ahead. I am anticipating periods of black-out (though none have yet occurred), and given the new requirements at work, my computer time there and at home may of necessity be reserved for job-related activity. Stay safe, everybody. And sane.

2007-05-04T22:44:00.000-07:00

World Without Oil: Neighborhood Watch

Well, the Neighborhood Watch meeting took place tonight at Tim’s house. Only about a dozen homeowners attended; there are forty houses on this street.

Tim is not his real name, by the way; I’ve started to have second thoughts about revealing too much information here, information that might very well supply somebody with the means to triangulate my location. Paranoia? In the current climate, what represents a judicious degree of caution, and what’s bona fide paranoia? I want to be forthcoming about what happens here, what our preparations are for the foreseeable future, in the hope that the exchange of information may prove helpful to others – but I do not want to jeopardize our chances of survival if more dire scenarios play out.

Given that the situation has deteriorated nationwide over the past couple of days, an agenda for establishing a simple Neighborhood Watch program quickly gave way to other concerns. In the first place, Tim hadn’t been able to get anyone from the police department to come out to speak with us on such short notice – they’ve apparently got their hands full. But, too, we all now share a common entry point of shared concern: high gas prices and what they mean.

What they have meant immediately is that people can’t park their cars out on the street for fear of having the gasoline siphoned out in the middle of the night. It’s happened twice now. This seems to be most people’s area of concern, especially those with multiple vehicles: which one do you park in the garage and which do you sacrifice to the vandals? We’ve all heard stories that gas thieves are even breaking into garages in the area, mostly apartment building parking structures.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting there thinking, “Don’t these people watch the news? Can’t they interpret what’s being said officially and draw a few conclusions? They all seem to be behaving as if this is a temporary – almost a local – problem that will soon resolve itself. Nobody’s thinking about the longer term consequences.”

But I think I was being unfair. Some vague notions about the shadow this is casting on all our futures were operating. They were present as a background fear coloring everything, and I found myself wishing that we could just drag it out into the open. A lot of psychic energy was being expended on keeping it contained. We need a realistic assessment of the threats we face, and fearful people don’t really think all that clearly.

But I also hedged my bets as I carefully tried to steer conversation towards the topic of what we might be able to do for each other, collectively, if the circumstances persisted or got worse – something more than just “keep an eye peeled.” At one point, however, someone spoke up, “You’re talking about Peak Oil, aren’t you? Is that what you think this is about?”

I could tell by the tone of his question that he was prepared to be dismissive. I said yes, I did think this was about Peak Oil, and a couple of other neighbors asked, with apparent honest curiosity, what we were talking about.

I explained that oil fields follow pretty predictable patterns of production and eventual depletion; that many oil geologists believe that those patterns are applicable to the oil productivity of countries as a whole, and therefore of global production as well. Peak Oil is shorthand for that point when we reach global maximum production of this non-renewable resource, after which extractable supplies will inevitably, irremediably decline. There have been several predictions for when it might occur, but recently, in the face of rising global demand for oil, production figures suggest that we have reached the plateau that may in fact represent that peak. When it is recognized for what it is, oil producing countries will begin to limit their exports – even resorting to reneging on signed contracts and commitments with importing countries. Did that sound familiar to anyone?

What followed was the sort of discussion I’ve had many times over the past couple of years. How did I know how much oil there was in the ground? Was I some sort of oil expert? (I’m not.) Aren’t we finding more all the time? (We’re not, at least if you're talking about giant fields that could significantly reverse the decline.) Surely government leaders wouldn’t have simply ignored the problem if they thought it represented this much of a threat? Wasn’t industry working to find substitutes for oil? Wasn’t ethanol or hydrogen going to take its place? What made me think this particular crisis signaled the onset of a global energy decline? In the past, these sorts of shortages were the products of open conspiracies to deprive us of oil, like the OPEC embargoes of the 70s. Why did I suppose this wasn’t the same thing, or some kind of ploy by oil companies to increase their profits?

Overall, fielding questions like this, you just get the sense that the problem is too overwhelming to deal with or to take in – somebody else, some bigger, more capable organization (scientists, industry, government, the marketplace, the UN, somebody . . .) will have to deal with it, fix it. When they do, we’ll be willing to pay for it, whatever it costs – grudgingly, perhaps, but we’ll pay.

The idea that the problem actually lies in our patterns of consumption, and is thoroughly embedded there as a kind of cultural entitlement, is just too difficult to get across, let alone expect your listener to digest. Everybody wants to think about it in terms of, “How can we get this baby back up and running? How do we fix it so that we can run it this way . . . forever?”

Forever’s a long time, especially when you’re talking about burning up one-time-only ancient reservoirs of stored energy. There are replacements, I said, things that human communities have employed to meet basic survival needs for hundreds and thousands of years, before we ever stumbled on the means to exploit fossil fuels; and those are the kinds of solutions we may find ourselves having to return to. If the cavalry doesn’t come charging over the hill to our rescue.

At some point, someone requested that we return to the matter at hand: what were we going to do about these gasoline thefts? Now there was a problem we could deal with.

We actually decided to go with sentries! Night watchmen. That’s right, a regular rotation of observers who would alert the police (and whoever’s vehicle was being targeted) at the first sign of trouble. It would mean getting a little less sleep at night, but it seemed like the only logical solution for the immediate problem. All the neighbors, even those who hadn’t attended the meeting, would be informed of what we were doing.

No one voiced what I’m sure we were all thinking: what would we do if the police didn’t show up when we called? Someone did suggest, however, that this could easily deteriorate into some sort of vigilantism; we should pledge among ourselves not to employ violence (absolutely no guns!) or even to get involved in trying to run the intruders off. We all agreed. Then we drew names out of a hat to establish the first watch and exchanged contact information. We’d rotate the schedule every week, until the problem subsided. Personally, I wonder how long that will be.

To their credit, a couple of people approached me on the sidewalk outside afterwards to continue our discussion of Peak Oil. No one was buying into the idea, but they were all curious. I agreed to loan them a couple of books (Heinberg’s The Party’s Over, Kunstler’s The Long Emergency) and a DVD (Community Solution’s The Power of Community, about how Cuba dealt with similar circumstances after the collapse of the Soviet Union.) And I told them to go home and google “Peak Oil.” Check out a couple of websites, notably LATOC and The Oil Drum. I said I’d be happy to continue the conversation at any time, but they needed to come to their own conclusions.

I can’t be certain, but I think I actually managed, if only for a few moments there, to call attention to that elephant that was in the room, to drag the fear up out of the shadows. Nobody felt good about it, to be sure; but at least we’d been able to discuss it for a few moments before shoving it back down into the darkness. How soon will it be, I wonder, before we are forced to confront it again?

2007-05-03T11:04:00.000-07:00

World Without Oil: The news, and other half-truths

The local news last night did a story on Los Angeles in the year 2020. They were busy predicting – that is, promoting – a Jetson-like vision of mag-lev bullet trains, gleaming monorails, and multi-billion dollar public works projects creating mixed-use urban hubs in the downtown area, as if the future will be just like the past only there’ll be more of everything. Everything good, that is.

The story ran right after they aired footage of out-of-control, baton-wielding cops charging into a crowded immigration rally the day before, roughing up cameramen and reporters trying to record the incident. If the past is a predictor of the future, do we have more of that to look forward to as well?

Strange day at work yesterday. Everybody knew something was up, lots of meetings behind closed doors, that sort of thing. I must have had a dozen people in my office asking me what was going on, and I had to answer them honestly: I didn’t know. There’s a kind of unspoken anxiety in the air now anyhow, but all the activity had folks more nervous than usual. You can sense it when people are worried about their futures; suddenly every little thing out of the ordinary is transformed into an omen, ratcheting up the uncertainty.

Then, finally, towards the end of the day, a memo goes out telling everyone to save their work to the server and completely shut down their computers, all peripherals and even power strips for the night before leaving. Any work that isn’t saved will be gone the next morning because the night cleaning crew has been instructed to go
through the building and turn off all lights and equipment when they close up. Everything but the servers and the alarm. Oh, and a brief addendum to encourage everyone to participate in the company's rideshare program.

Now this sort of thing has happened on occasion, when there was a planned outage or the servers were going down for maintenance over a weekend. But this is different: this is now a policy, and it’s going to be strictly enforced from here on out.

Okay, so finally this incredibly wasteful practice of leaving everything up and running all night has been curtailed – good for us, even if it took a crisis to force it upon us. We are now officially conserving, not that I hadn’t been doing it all along. I have to admit, I took a certain satisfaction in that. But it didn’t last long. We’re all in this together now.

Just as I was getting ready to leave, my boss comes into my office and closes the door. Now I’m feeling a little nervous. He wants to discuss the project we’re working on. We’ve got a deadline to meet; there’s a lot riding on its success, an investment of three years of work and a huge marketing campaign in place and ready to go.

Something’s worrying him, but he’s not telling me exactly what it is. I know the guy; I know when he’s not telling me the whole story. He asks me to think about a plan for allowing people to work from home, to telecommute. The company is anticipating that people will be asking for this anyway, with the high gas prices and everything, and given the nature of our work (and the importance of that deadline) we’re in an ideal position to take advantage of it. He asks me to get back to him by Monday.

So I think I’ve figured out the part of the story he wasn’t telling me. Somebody somewhere higher up knows that this isn’t a temporary glitch in the system. The word has gone out, but not to the public at large, which thinks it’s only about rising gas prices, oil company conspiracies, a distribution problem that’s in the process of being fixed. At some point, things will return to normal, whatever normal is, or was. But there are others who know better.

It’s time to find some more oil somewhere, because it isn’t coming out of the ground as easily as it used to, and it isn’t being exported, by the producing countries that are past peak, in the quantities in which it’s needed. It’s being hoarded, taken off the market, and the dwindling supplies that are available are being bid up out of reach in a rapidly contracting game of musical chairs. The only way to find more oil is the way we should have been finding it for some time now: by conserving the stuff we have instead of consuming it as if the supplies were endless.

After all, the reservoirs may very well be half-empty, but that also means they’re still half-full.

2007-05-02T08:31:00.000-07:00

World Without Oil: Keeping an eye out

Another overcast day in Los Angeles, not unusual for this time of year. It's called (by the local Happy Weatherpersons) "June Gloom" no matter when it happens, and it ordinarily burns off by the late morning or early afternoon here in the Valley.

It’s actually pretty much perfect weather for riding your bicycle to work, and that’s what I did. Haven’t done it in a while, but I was surprised to see more people on bicycles this morning than I can remember seeing in the past – are people actually getting the message here? I wonder. Traffic was still bad though, and the two miles to work is an obstacle course, given the proximity of the bike lanes to two or three lanes of automobiles. The buses passing me on the Orange Line are packed to the gills now; the line hit its estimated capacity nine years ahead of schedule, and they're scrambling to bring on more buses. I’m lucky I live this close to my office.

The newscasts seem to be taking this business a bit more seriously at this point, I think because the “spike” just keeps on “spiking.” At first they were just reporting the usual explanations like the “changeover at refineries from winter to summer blends.” Now, keying off the calls for Congressional inquiries, they’re starting to hint at conspiracies, but no respectable news-gathering organization wants to get out in front of that story. So for the most part, the news value of the story is derived from reporters standing in front of gas stations, recording the prices being changed (hourly) and interviewing perplexed and, in some cases, angry patrons who are nonetheless continuing to pump and pay the higher prices for gas anyway. Even though prices are up on average 150% over this same period last year, demand is also expected to rise! We are a happy-motoring nation after all, and nothing will prevent us from taking to the open road.

Elsewhere in the local news, Metrolink (the local train service) says it has to raise fares based on distance traveled – in some cases by as much as 10 or 15%. And a story on the radio this morning detailed plans by the Department of Water and Power to raise rates to reflect rising fuel costs. Just a coincidence, of course. Most of our power here still comes from coal-fired plants.

Here’s something unusual: my neighbor came to my door last night after I got home from work. This is unusual because, like a lot of people in this city, I don’t know my neighbor. He’s lived across the street from me for five years (I’ve lived here for twenty), and our contact has been pretty much restricted to an occasional wave, a shout and a smile. Then get in your car and drive off.

He’d seen me ride up on my bike, so that brought a comment about trying to economize under the circumstances. Ha ha.

But his real concern was that cars parked out on the street had been vandalized the night before – people had had their gas tanks drained. Had I seen anything, heard anything? No, I had to say, I hadn’t, but I’d be sure to keep an eye out for anything suspicious. He said he was thinking of calling a meeting at his house to form a Neighborhood Watch; we’ve never had one where I live. It’s a pretty quiet neighborhood.

He thought it was time. I told him I thought so, too. Actually, I’ve been wondering how to break the Peak Oil news to my neighbors. This may just be the occasion. We’ll see.

2007-05-01T10:44:00.000-07:00

World Without Oil: Mayday! Or not.

May first, the first day of what may come.

What a difference a day makes – and a good night’s sleep. Sorry about that post yesterday; that’s just my particular flavor of paranoia at work, I guess. I’m all better now. I promise. I mean, nobody seems to be making a big deal about this price spike. There’s the usual chatter on the ‘net, conspiracy theories galore. The papers are all over it, but who reads the papers anymore? You look around, nobody seems to be concerned – no panic in the streets, no lines at the gas stations. (Although, for some reason, some folks are blogging about long gas lines, fights breaking out. What newscasts are they watching, I wonder? Honestly, I think people are just making this shit up.)

People at work barely discussed it yesterday, and today it’s fallen almost completely off their radar. I went to the store last night to stock up, and I have to admit, I felt a little ridiculous loading up on things like toilet paper, batteries and bottled water. I was the only one doing so. The check-out clerk looked at me askance and remarked, “Are we having a sale on this stuff or something?”

“I’m getting ready for the Big One,” I said. We both laughed. Ha ha.

People in Southern California dance on the faultline of disaster daily - wildfires, mudslides, flooding, earthquakes. We like to joke about it. Makes us feel better.

I don’t get it. What I think is, somebody’s messing with us, using this as some kind of a test situation. I mean, a price jump of more than a dollar a gallon, all at once, nationwide? Usually the price increases are local, spotty and all over the map, depending on refinery production. In California, a lot of our oil comes down from Alaska; elsewhere, it comes in through the Gulf of Mexico and the East Coast. And don’t individual distributors ultimately set prices? But now, it all shoots skyward simultaneously, everywhere, without a hurricane or a potential attack on Iran to incite a run-up? This makes no sense, and nobody seems to have a good explanation.

There’s a guy at work who likes to refer to me as “Peak Freak,” and I don’t think he means it as a compliment. I’m guessing other people think of me that way as well, but he’s the only one who calls me that to my face. Too many heated conversations in the lunchroom, I guess. He popped into my office this morning and said, “Care to place a bet? Gas prices will drop again before the end of the month. They’ll be back below $3 before they ever get to $5.”

I passed. I’m hoping he’s right. It’s an anomaly, an aberration. It’s got to be – everything else is so damn normal. The rest of America seems to be concerned with who’ll be voted off American Idol this week. So why should I worry? Congress will investigate; the oil companies will suddenly discover supplemental supplies; the plunge protection team will dive in to shore up any effects the temporary shortage may have on the economy; and I’ll have a more than ample supply of toilet paper, batteries and bottled water at my disposal.

Ha ha.

2007-04-30T11:44:00.000-07:00

World Without Oil: Day one - Price spike

I've got that feeling in the pit of my stomach again, the one that starts there and moves up my spine until it hits the back of my neck, the one I got when I first read about the possible consequences of Peak Oil. It's a sort of sick feeling, the one that says, "You knew this day was coming, and now here it is. And all those preparations you were going to make? Too late, my friend, too late."

I put them off. So here I am, waiting, going about my everyday business, hoping that the situation isn't going to get as bad as I imagine it's going to get; because if it does, if it continues to escalate into something really dire, Los Angeles, the most car-centric city in America, will become the poster child for the consequences of our addiction to oil. And I'm sitting right here in the middle of it. We've had something close to $4 a gallon gasoline before, and the world didn't fall apart. So maybe this time . . . maybe.

But what makes this different is that it's a jump of a dollar in next to no time at all - and they claim it's just "renegotiated contracts"! What the hell are those, and wouldn't someone have seen that coming? Couldn't someone have warned us? Instead, everybody's just scratching their heads and apparently looking for somebody to blame. And what will the price be next week, and when the effects start rippling through the economy . . . ? What will be offered as an explanation then?

Congress is calling for an immediate investigation; clearly nobody has a clue. Or do they? I wonder. Who can you trust in this situation?

Maybe it's temporary. I'm not so much worried about myself, but about the community around me - how will it react? Time will tell. For the moment, my guess is that we'll all go on pretending this is the new normal. That's what I'm doing, but, in the back of my mind is the voice asking the question: should I be edging my way towards the exits? Is this that moment?