Happy Motoring
July 29, 2010
In the fall of 1970, against my father’s advice, I spent the entire contents of my savings account, ($1,300), on a 1968 Mustang 2+2 fastback. I was a sophomore in college, and after a nearly disastrous, (academically), first year living in a dormitory, I moved back home and became a commuter student. My dad was supportive of my proposal that I buy my own car, but he was thinking along the lines of a Volkswagen.
My Mustang was originally sold in the Midwest, so it wasn’t geared for the hills of Appalachia. This necessitated some frequent “stirring” of the 4 speed gearbox, which I found to be a pleasure rather than a chore. My 289 V8 “muscle car” was a dog off the line, but once it got up into the sweet spot of the RPM curve, it would take off like a hound dog after a rabbit when you mashed the throttle. The car would do 85 in 3rd gear at redline, and I saw the wrong side of 100 mph many times in top gear. Bear in mind that the speed limit on the interstate highways was 75 at that time. I would cruise along at the speed limit, or a little above, in 4th gear. When I eventually got stuck behind someone going slower, it was great fun to drop into 3rd gear, stomp the throttle and wind up to redline before slamming into 4th. If I remember correctly we termed this totally unnecessary act “blowing their doors off”.
I wrecked the car on the way to an 8:00 a.m. final in December two years later, spent too much money fixing it, and eventually traded it in on a new 1974 Ford Pinto. There probably is some symbolism in all of that, but it escapes me at the moment. The experience of owning that car was a mixed bag of emotions during a turbulent time in my life. I am actually fortunate that I did buy the car then as it saved me countless thousands of dollars later in life. It seems that Boomers having mid-life crises invariably seek out Mustangs as a way to re-capture some of the lost vigor of youth. I could say that I had already been there and done that. I had sex in the back seat of a Mustang when I was young enough not be uncomfortable doing it.
The purpose of this blog entry in not just a self-serving trip down memory lane, but also a description of an age that is ending, the age of cheap energy. No future generation will ever waste locomotive energy in such a profligate manner. In fact, the cost of moving ourselves from point A to point B in some type of vehicle will radically change every aspect of our lives. We have built our country on an unsustainable framework, and when it soon collapses, much of what we take for granted will disappear.
I could write for days about Peak Oil and never begin to approach the excellent compilation of facts and projections that can be found at the following website:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Index.html
I strongly urge you to read the information provided on this website. Follow the links and read them as well. If, when you are finished, you think Peak Oil is a scam, then go about your life as you see fit. There is, however, a good chance that the evidence provided by Matt Savinar will change how you look at every aspect of your life and the world around you. It will be as if you took the “red pill” in the Matrix. There won’t be any going back once your eyes are open.
Will you liquidate all of your assets and purchase a survival retreat in Idaho? Probably not, but you will definitely start thinking about the very probable scenarios coming soon and begin to make preparations to better weather the troubled times ahead. As I plod along in the everyday world, I look at current behavior now through “Peak Oil” glasses. Some activities seem ludicrous in the extreme, like spending billions of dollars on new highway construction.
Many times when I observe something commonplace in today’s world I will say to myself , “That’s not going to be around for much longer”. As my friend George likes to say, “That music is over”. For instance, recently I drove 45 minutes each way, (distance in Appalachia is measured in time , not miles), to help my mother-in-law fix a hinge on her front gate. It took less than 10 minutes to get the hinge back on, and I was back in the car for the ride home. I couldn’t help but think that if gasoline was back up to $5 a gallon, that repair job would have to wait until it could be combined with another trip. At $10 a gallon, she would have been finding someone much closer to help her.
While there are so many aspects of Peak Oil that are alarming, what keeps me awake in the middle of the night is what I call the Three Possibilities. It is a certainty that civilization as we know it is hurtling full speed at a cliff with an extremely steep drop-off. There are 3 possible scenarios, as I see it, for how we “manage” the drop-off.
1. We all just muddle through without any clear direction, ending in wide scale economic and political chaos.
I rate this as highly unlikely, the Elite that manage us will implement a series of plans to do their best to benefit from the emergency, at the expense of the general population. They have their bunkers well-stocked and their security teams in place.
2. Major world players recognize the gravity of the situation and come together in a unified fashion to manage the downslide in critical resources.
I find this even more unlikely than number 1. If you buy into this possibility, no doubt you enjoy sitting around campfires singing “Kumbaya” and pretending you all love each other.
3. Major world players will ride the resource depletion horse into the ground, and then at the critical juncture, make a grab for remaining oil-producing territories no matter who owns them or what it costs.
I find this the most likely possibility. Imagine a hotly contested game of marbles on a school playground when the end-of-recess bell rings. The biggest kids will grab for the most marbles. Not only will valuable resources be squandered in the conflicts that arise, but the loss of life through war and supply disruption will be catastrophic. This is the “Mad Max” scenario, and its the one I end up stuck in at 4:00 a.m. Even if you do buy that survival retreat in Idaho, you will have to be extremely lucky to make it through this outcome.
After reading Matt’s website, if you are interested in other Peak Oil literature, here are some additional selections:
http://www.amazon.com/Partys-Over-Fate-Industrial-Societies/dp/0865714827/ref=cm_lmf_tit_1
http://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Desert-Coming-Saudi-Economy/dp/047173876X/ref=cm_lmf_tit_2
