I can always count on the youngest of my big sisters to send me those feel-good emails with the animated puppies and kitties with their subtle warnings of dire consequences if I don't forward the email to at least 6 people.

But today she took a break from puppies and kittens to send me an email about a woman who purchased a 2006 Hummer H3 and converted it into a 'rolling memorial' for her son who was killed in Iraq. The H3 features a 25,000 paint job (a good-hearted body shop did it for her at cost for $3k) and you can see photos here.

I'm sure that there are a lot of people who see that as a touching homage to fallen heroes. Personally I see it as spending 3 grand worth of petroleum-based paint on a gas guzzler with a pathetic 16 MPG combined rating.

I am not some environmentalist global warming greenpeace nutjob, and the last thing I want is to be perceived of as bashing anyone - least of all a parent of a fallen veteran - But JEEZ, lady! I don't really do politics on this site but the sick irony of this story left me shaking my head as I watched a grief-stricken fellow countryman go out of her way to put money into the hands of her child's murderers.

Labels: Peak_Oil, The_News

My first reactions to this my "Oh Crap" moment were guilt and shame, followed up with an anger chaser. Yes, I have been told that we are running out of oil, just as I have been told that the hydrocarbon emissions are wreaking serious havoc on our atmosphere - It's one thing to know these things and quite another to know these things, if you follow. The problem is that these impending crises are treated more as a footnote rather than as a main subject, because the notion of radically changing our materialistic American lifestyle is not a popular topic in most circles (Why, now that's Commie-talk!).

To hear Bush tell us that we are addicted to oil and then not offer any leadership (Much less a tangible plan) for solving the problem is not for our own benefit. It is positioning for himself to be able to say "I told you so" later without having to deal with the problem now. He's protecting his legacy instead of us.

In my adulthood I have journeyed across the American political spectrums, and my passions have ranged from a "Just leave me alone" brand of ignorance to a "Somebody (other than me) should do something" type of caring to "A pox on both your houses" attitude of political withdrawl.

If you think about politics in America long enough you're bound to have an "Oh Crap" moment there too. It's all about popularity. Not a lot of Americans are going to vote for someone who tells them that they need to stop driving, to stop buying junk from overseas and to begin preparing to live a lot more localized sustainable existence. To survive in American politics you need to be a good whistler, because there are a lot of graveyards out there. Or, to paraphrase Richard Dreyfuss from the movie "Jaws," "We are going to ignore this particular problem until it swims up and bites us on the ass."

All this talk brings to mind 1 Corinthians 2:
"your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God."

I don't know what type of insight I will be able to offer on the subjects of Peak oil and the inevitable decline in American lifestyle that will result from it. Right now I am calmly trying to dispel the knee-jerk reaction of thinking that the sky is going to fall tomorrow, so that when I do write about it I won't sound like a raving lunatic.

Labels: Life, Peak_Oil

Do you know what an "Oh Crap!" moment is?

For me the most illustrative example I can take from my childhood is when I would find myself on a roller coaster, right before hitting the peak on that first big hill. The point where I would come to my senses and realize that I was moments away from taking a seriously scary-ass plunge down the other side of the hill.

It is a moment of clarity, where you realize that you are totally dependant on a whole slew of people that you don't know - The engineer who designed the coaster, the greasemonkey who takes care of it, the administrator in charge of paying the greasemonkey, et al - The point is, you got yourself into this mess and now you are going to have to ride it out and pray that everybody else has done their jobs.

"America is addicted to oil"
-George W. Bush

Who, me?

Pretty much everything I consume is procured by oil, and a startling amount of the crap I buy is made from the stuff. And such is the case with pretty much everyone I know personally. Most people who care to think about such things agree that oil is a finite resource. But if it's going to run out someday, how much do we have left and why isn't that information being talked about or made readily available?

The answer could lay in the notion that the earth, if farmed in a pre-industrial (Read: non-mechanized) capacity, can yield enough crops to feed about a billion people. With modern agribusiness, using mechanization and chemicals, we are straining to feed 6 billion people now, with the population growth showing no signs of slowing. Without trying to sound like a black helicopter lunatic from the fringe, I would submit to the four people who read this blog that there is the makings of a global crisis - If not within my own lifetime at least within my son's. Not talking about a global crisis that could wipe out 5 billion people is probably only partially a lunatic fringe conspiracy. I would say moreover it's not talked about because such an event is unspeakable.

Now my thoughts turn to home, where my heart is. My house is a suburban McMansion (It is quite modest by suburban McMansion standards, but nevertheless a palace compared to a homestead in rural Kentucky). It is heated with gas, depends on electricity for cooking & food storage and is serviced by city water & sewer. What this translates to (On the other side of the hill) is a dwelling that is isolated by great distance from my place of work, completely dependant on the grid. There are no alternatives in terms of heat, water, or waste removal. The real kick in the nuts is that my neighborhood is built on an old sod farm. The builders put about two inches of topsoil down on top of a bed of sand and laid sod. So in effect it is still a sod farm, one with houses. One that is costly in terms of the amount of water needed to keep the grass alive due to the poor water retention of the soil. I only bring this up because as attractive the thought of subsistence farming on my own land in order to augment my food supply, the simple fact is that as it is right now my land could not grow much besides a bumper crop of tumbleweed if it came right down to it.

Oh Crap.

I'll be posting more on this vein in the months to come. I feel as though I have been awakened, to the sound of something rattling around downstairs. I cannot in good conscience go back to sleep without investigating the sound that has brought me out of my dreaming. I sense that it is most likely that I will never go back to sleep again.

Labels: House, Life, Peak_Oil