Heads in the Sand

In conversations with my fellow residents of Lower Alabama, I am almost always amazed at how uninformed and gullible they are. While talking about the oil spill (it is really a well blow-out not a spill) in the Gulf, I find it remarkable that a seemingly large number of people believe that environmental extremists committed some act of sabotage on Deepwater Horizon. They do not seem to realize how difficult it would be for someone to infiltrate an oil drilling platform 50 miles off of the coast of Louisiana, much less the technical expertise it would take for then to disguise the act to make it look just like a methane gas well blow-out. I do wonder why the more plausible and factual cause of the disaster, lax government oversight and deregulation coupled with cost cutting and unsafe work practices by the management on Deepwater Horizon seems to be so unbelievable.




Of course these are some of the same people who think that the military should use a nuclear bomb to stop the oil from gushing out of the well head. I have to admit that a nuclear bomb would stop the leak, but will point out that the radioactive tidal wave produced by it would probably poison the Gulf coast for much longer than the oil that is now coating the marshes and beaches. Now some people have the bright idea to drill a hole beside the well and place the nuclear bomb deep enough that most of the radiation is contained, and that it will not produce big of a tidal wave (probably 12ft or less). They fail to grasp that by the time you bore a hole big and deep enough to place the bomb in that the relief wells will already be finished.



Then there are the people who are mad at BP (and justly so) and are boycotting them. A boycott is well and good but if you are not willing to give up your SUV and decrease your energy usage then you are only going to hurt the local owners of the convinence store that is unlucky enough to have a BP sign on their gas pumps. This is because BP will just sell its gas to Chevron, Shell and all of the independent gas stations and continue to happily take our money. If we do not make the connection between this disaster, the economic crash of 2008, the invasion of Iraq, rising food prices in the developing world and or national debt with our consumption of oil and other raw materials then we are just paying lip service to our outrage and inviting these disasters or worse to happen again and again.



Here we are almost 2 years after the market crash of 2008 which was brought on in large part by oil reaching $147 a barrel. And the worlds demand for oil is about 3.5 times less now then it was then and oil is at $70 a barrel. What do you think is going to happen when demand starts to pick back up? If we keep failing to realize how much of our lives revolve around petroleum and keep using it at ever increasing rates we are going to come up very hard and fast to the wall of reality. Now some people will say that there is plenty of oil left in Saudi Arabia, to which I generally ask why the Saudi’s are spending so much money to build nuclear reactors if they have an unlimited supply of oil left in the ground. If there Ghawar oil field still has billions of barrels left in it then why are they drilling more wells off shore? The short answer is that they (and the world) have passed the peak of oil production.



We have a few years (or hopefully decades) to prepare for a new and harsher future without cheap oil. We need to become more local in not just our lives but also in our government. Actually our government is probably where we need to start the localization effort at. In this we are lucky because that was how our Constitution and government was conceived to work. We just need to get the federal government out of local government. This will mean to cut off the federal welfare that most states rely on. As simple as this sounds it will not be easy, as a matter of fact I think that it will be so onerous to do that no politician(s) will attempt it. Instead people will clamor for more government help and hand-outs. This includes the Tea Party which want lower taxes and less federal interference in their lives with the exception of Social Security, and Medicare, and unemployment insurance which they either receive or soon will receive.



We will be forced to take some very serious austerity measures in this country in the next few years if we want to survive as a country. And I fear that we will see rioting and civil unrest much worse than Europe has seen when people’s false idea of the American dream becomes a distance and unreachable reality. We have replaced our forefathers’ dreams of freedom with dreams of safety and material wealth. Our system of government was formed to protect us from exploitation and tyranny, which we have surrendered to in the name of economic growth and material possessions.



If we do not pull our collective heads out of the sand and from real local communities, then our collective asses will be handed to us. We have to find community solutions to problems such as food and transportation before the price of petroleum makes these unaffordable. Because there is nothing to take the place of our reliance on petroleum, no cold fusion power plants, national wind power grids or any other pipe dream that can realistically replace our national reliance on cheap oil. We need to develop micro power grids which will be much easier to maintain to produce and distribute electricity locally than it is to have a national grid. The same is true for local food and transportation systems. We need to quickly dispose of our disposable society now before it becomes to expensive to maintain, because now we have the energy and time to do it. If we wait until oil becomes to expensive we will not be able to afford a comfortable change and our society will collapse under its own weight.