no substitutions please

NO SUBSTITUTIONS PLEASE


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There were many of us that got involved in the study of Peak Oil, mostly because we had no lives and wondered what new hobby we could engage in that cost almost nothing but the odd book or two. And the main consensus evolved that we were all going to die because we had substituted petroleum for almost all inputs in our creation of food. Something like 20% of our oil goes to food, not including domestic energy for refrigeration and cooking. It goes something like this. Oil for tractors and machines in their manufacturing. Oil to run the machines. Natural gas to fertilize the soil that would otherwise be dead due to decades of mono-cropping. Oil to transport the food thousands of miles, package it, sell it. Before, we had a ring of decentralized farmland and dairies surrounding urban areas. The farmers put pasture aside to feed animals that provided fertilizer for the farm. With the industrialization of agriculture, that was all deemed too inefficient. And at the time it was. It was easier and cheaper to substitute oil for pasture, oil for diversified planting and fallow times. Obviously, oil substitution was cheaper than a lot of things, as we will see. But the way we produce food is the best known example. In a overflowing petroleum age, it made sense. But long term, it was as stupid as using a cheese crater to scratch an itch on the family jewels. It is already biting us in the ass.

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We have substituted insulation and quality building material with cheap natural gas and heating oil, as well as hydro or nuke powered electric air conditioning. Almost no houses in this country can keep their inhabitants alive all winter long without petroleum ( any survival advice to survive the winter is usually only short term because of this issue ). These two things alone should raise red flags, our food and winter survival 99% oil based. But most preppers are growing their own food and heating with wood ( except the Yuppie Survivalists, who almost universally depend on Exxon-Mobil size storage tanks of carbon fuels to get through the winters in the style they insist on ) so outside that miniscule minority no one seems to sense any danger. Most towns will have issues with water supplies, being tied to the grid, other than the old cities that developed a gravity system prior to electricity. The main problem is going to be all the areas built up since WWII, mostly in areas that had no business seeing millions move in. Phoenix and Vegas and LA and San Diego, etc. They used oil to substitute for unexploited pioneer land ( when The West Was Won, and Alaska became a state, what was left for those wishing for elbow room? Only land uninhabitable without abundant oil.

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Oil has been used as a substitute for recycling. Take a cardboard box. Used for nothing but shipping consumer items, trees are killed to ship Little Tommy a petroleum based plastic ( plastic containers being used as an oil substitute for collecting bottles and cleaning them. God knows that almost all jobs needing labor are candidates for oil-substitution. We simply can’t reduce the CEO’s valuable compensation with unneeded workers ) toy. The box is flattened in the store using a huge metal compactor ( metal smelted, juiced by coal fired electrical plants ) and a huge truck burning oil comes around and takes the boxes who knows how many miles away where oil is used to recycle the material, and the whole cycle starts over. And that is if the cardboard is even recycled at all. Usually we just kill the tree and bury it a landfill. Next up, as most of our jobs are pretty useless in the scheme of things, look at all the oil going to keep us all alive. As with most things in the Oil Age, everything has been switched over to quantity rather than quality. Before oil, a few of us worked for the benefit of ourselves, about 80% of our labor, and the other Kings Fifth we paid as protection money ( both literally buying protection from the neighboring king and bribing our king to prey on the other village rather than yours ). Now, with so many more people being put to work, there is a lot more serf’s to tax. And the Kings Fifth ( anything more was impractical and killed off the farming taxpayers ) has turned into the Obammy 50% ( which is only the visible portion. Most likely 75% is more realistic ). But, hey, food used to be subsidized and our jobs were pushing paper, so we didn’t mind too much. But as oil dries up, so do the make-work jobs.

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Globalization was not much more than substituting high wages ( necessitated by the need to pay all the built in complexity costs ) with oil. We build ocean fleets and fuel them to run to newly built factories employing almost free labor living in countries that give workers nearly free food grown with petroleum as almost the only incentive needed to work. As that country turns to a higher standard of living, we move over to the next country that does the same thing. The beauty part was as you displace farmers with petroleum, you build in this self perpetuating cycle. Substituting a self sufficient economy with a short term oil dependent one. The importance here is that all these things combined, plus hundreds I didn’t think of, combined, equal a nuclear chain reaction of failure as petroleum starts getting too expensive or too scarce. Back in the seventies, we had the remnant legacy system of decentralized food and no where near the petroleum substitution we have today, along with ONLY higher prices rather than an actual supply contraction. We are so much more vulnerable today. But rather than cry, Havoc! And let slip the drill, baby, drill, how about trying to find something that isn’t petroleum substituted in our civilization. I’d be interested if you find anything.

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