till 2030

TILL 2030


A minion suggested I should be using camping fuel for my heating and cooking, thus somewhat solving the resupply-on-a-bike issue. Being one who always looks a gift horse in the mouth since it could be booby trapped or contain a new strain of hoof and mouth disease that transfers to humans and I would thus become Patient Zero ( Patient Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel ), my dragging feet leaving behind chunky bloody hunks of flesh and my jaw rotting away into black jagged stinking holes, which I assume we could all do without, I looked in the Wal-Mart camping section and for once the manufactures of products designed to defeat Imperialist Running Dog Round Eyes such as Coleman were rather helpful and had a simple little diagram on their Duel Fuel stove ( Coleman 1-Burner Dual Fuel Sporter II Liquid Fuel Stove ) showing a comparison of propane disposable bottles verses Coleman Fuel. Equivalent energy of a gallon of fuel were four and a half disposable propane bottles. If you were buying disposables you would save roughly a dime by buying the generic liquid fuel instead. But, if you used refillable bottles you are paying twice as much by going liquid rather than staying with propane. A refillable five gallon tank is roughly seventeen pounds of propane ( a disposable is one pound ). Call it 15. That is thirty bucks of liquid fuel for the equivalent energy, instead of $15 to fill up the propane tank. Not a good replacement fuel. You need to compare BTU’s per dollar to get a sense of worthiness. Don’t tease me with suggestions unless you can prove your case. Or, the minion could have been wanting me to do the research for him and just got me riled up as camouflage. Or, he could have been setting me up for failure, my ass hanging out in the wind if I didn’t confirm. Or, he could be a federal agent trying to bust me for having bomb ingredients. Hmmmm.

*

I used to think that four years was a lifetime away when I was impatiently waiting for my public school prison term to end ( I was lucky in having a number of very motivated and brilliant teachers but they didn’t make the wait painless enough ). Three years turned out to be even longer after I got into the Army, ( DELUXE LOW PROFILE CAP ACU DIGITAL - ARMY ) which was all I ever wanted to do as a career, and discovered that rather than shooting things ( or pretending to ) I was stuck in a ongoing office politics situation. The officer corps in the military are fundamentally moronic weasels that couldn’t find a boil the size of a softball on their own asses ( of course, by and large those they were leading weren’t much better ). Now, as my children become adults and my lifespan enters its last third, twenty years ain’t what it used to be. It does seem to flash by, as any of you in my age bracket or up can attest to. For you younguns out there, 2030 might seem far, far away, but for a lot of us it is just around the corner. And, if you’ve been paying attention to my ranting and raving, grunts of intellectual strain emanating from a once calm and peaceful “fair weather survivalist” ( one who only worries of short term disruptions rather than long term collapse ), I’ve pointed out that others far smarter than I have pegged 2030 as the year petroleum supplies run down the bell curve to match that of a hundred years previous in 1930. We had no where near the global population then as we do now so that amount of petroleum isn’t even close to being sufficient to feed us all ( even a twenty year crash course towards sustainable agriculture [ Crisis and Opportunity: Sustainability in American Agriculture (Our Sustainable Future)] doesn’t solve the transportation of food issue, degraded or paved over land issue, global weather change or other problems ).

*

In 1930 a third of us were on farms. We were just starting to seriously mechanize, which on small farms most likely meant mule pulled machines rather than tractors. Trains took the food to cities, if the farm wasn’t just used to feed the local settlements. No petroleum was used for fertilizer. Back then, rather than centralizing meat production fed with oil we feed our animals on the farm with our own grain or grass and they fertilized the soil. The point being that back then we were sustainable and now we are eating oil. In a mere twenty years we need to be back to 1930 in food production sustainability and we have yet to stop centralizing all aspects of society. In twenty years the US will most likely be broken apart as the vast majority of people, those living off the oil surplus ( Social Security, pensions, civil servants, Food Stampers, unemployment lifers, etc. ), turn on each other violently as they try to maintain their living standards. Let me put it this way so hopefully you don’t relax and think you have all the time in the world to collect AR-15 magazines ( AR15 / M16 30rd C Products US made Magazine ) and MRE pouches. In twenty years, the Oil Age will be effectively over and ALL NEGATIVE CHANGES WILL ALREADY HAVE OCCURRED. Let me repeat that for those of you that believe that a bell curve is just a suggestion. All the bad crap that happens when an empire collapses will have already been played out in a mere twenty years. If I am wrong, I’ll be kept alive by modern medicine and you may feel free to mock me unmercifully. I’ve been writing for twenty years already ( although the first ten were on the job training and sporadic the last ten were steady and accessible ) so chances are it will be easy to find me.

*

Globally, we have already seen per capita energy use lowered for some time. 1979 to be exact. At that point, each person had less and less energy available to them every year. Of course, we pretty much threw our weight around and stole as much as we needed ( which is good- the winning tribe takes the surplus by force ) and so those in Africa have far less energy to use than Americans or pretty much anyone else. But if you average it out we all collectively have less available. Unfortunately, in the last three years or so the globe has been much better at denying us the oil we want. Most likely this has to do with the fact that 80% of the oil is now under government control rather than the Seven Sisters ( or however few there are now )( The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the World They Shaped ). And the fact that China is making tools and goods and we are making more and more derivatives. Sooner or later even we will realize that Chinese currency and future political power will have the upper hand buying up the remaining oil supplies. Once it becomes so obvious in the rear view mirror that it is far too late to even panic. I say it has already happened. Why else has our oil import numbers been declining year after year?

*

If I’m wrong, you can find me easily on the Web. If I’m right I doubt this medium will survive that many more years. The Internet was a great tool for saving money and replacing labor. I doubt it will be subsidized past its usefulness just so you can keep your Facebook page updated. You don’t have twenty years to prepare. In twenty it will all be over but the crying.

END

The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon links in each article. You can purchase anything, not just the linked item. Enter Amazon through my item link and then go to whatever other item you desire. As long as you don’t leave Amazon until after the order is placed, I get credit for your purchase. Thank you.