(no, this is not about people deciding for some odd reason to blow themselves up)
Most of us tend to treat the arrival of winter with a relatively casual demeanor. Sure, we may be inconvenienced by having to scrape off the car in the morning, or not like bundling up in warm clothes, or may find that our houses are a little draftier than we first thought. Even the first big snows (for those who live where it does snow) is greeted with a little uncertainty, but after the first day or so, the roads are open again and we can be on our way. On the other end of the spectrum, we look forward to holiday celebrations or being able to sit near a roaring fire.
All this, of course, is a relatively modern development. In the past, things were drastically different and the approach of winter was heralded with dread. For example, an old Celtic folk song called "The Terror Time" details the misery and plight of displaced crofters trying to find someplace to hole up and last out winter until there is work again in the spring. Even if you had your own house, imagine huddling around a fire in the dead of winter, with little to do but last out the season and tend to the animals, hoping there would be enough food to hold everyone over until spring.
This should be a reminder that the modern world really is not prepared for the kind of weather we're now facing in North America, if we suffer a serious disruption to our infrastructure as collapse goes on. Modern homes are not designed to operate without electrical power to blow heated throughout a house and many, if not most, modern homes don't even have a fireplace or wood stove for warmth. Really, many of us in winter live a little like astronauts -- we dress for the inevitable dash to the car, then from the car into a building. If heating oil becomes scarcer or priced out of sight, if electrical production becomes less and less reliable, then what?
The answer to the problem is, of course, to make sure that, if we are building new at some point, to plan to stay warm if the grid fails, by building partly underground or by using other principles. This, of course, still leaves the question open of how most people are going to face winter if they are not properly prepared for it, which I think will be around ninety percent of the people in the industrial world. Most people remember Maslow's hierarchy of basic needs, shelter being one of them, and it should be clear how far people would be from being able to meet them. Unfortunately, I think that as we struggle to adjust to the reality of the coming Dark Age, winter is once again going to be the Terror Time for many, many people.
I think about this very often especially in terms of how far food has to move. Our systems are quite overburdened and fragile. Personally, I would love to say we are living in a way that is self-sustaining but we are not.
ReplyDeleteI once read a post on Peak Oil Debunked trying to point out the economics of transport in an age of rising fuel costs and how minimal the impact would be. What the author failed to take into account was that if the transportation network itself ran into problems, such as damaged roads, the cessation of commerce due to danger or political difficulties, etc, that the 2000 mile salad wasn't going to happen, no matter if it was only a buck or two more over the cost it had been before oil got scarcer.
ReplyDeleteThe irony of complex system is that they can be resilient, but the resiliency seems to be something like a chemical buffer -- once it reaches a critical point, it gets overloaded and quits working altogether. The various stresses of the last few years on our economy are pushing it beyond what I think it can sustain.
-John
Hey!
ReplyDeleteGreat post about the modern heated home - with peak oil and/or societal collapse, heating oil deliveries and/or prices, along with natural gas and electrical prices may become astromically expensive.
Has anyone ever had their furnace go out for more than a few hours? It is truly miserable. Now imagine living like that (without heat) forever.
Another reason to rent and not own your dwelling. If in the future, the heated home becomes a luxury affordable by few, than many who cannot afford to heat their homes and who live in the northern two-thirds of the country will abandon those homes (to move in with neighbors, or to move to warmer areas), and the abandoned house quickly becomes worthless (vandals, etc.).
I think it will pay to be mobile ...
However, if one does have savings, where is the best place to store them (fdic-insured (small) bank money-market, gold coins in safety deposit box, ...)
Scott in Bucks County
Scott,
ReplyDeleteGreat points, as always.
I think a thought that follows your post is William Manchester's work on the Middle Ages, entitled "A World Lit Only by Fire." It's unfortunate that such a pisspoor work had such an evocative title, but the idea that up until the last hundred or so years, man was living in a world that was, literally, lit only by fire, should cause people to really step back and think about the implications of what such a lifestyle truly means.
I once spent a 24 hour period in a modern house when the power went out in the dead of winter. Within 4-5 hours, the house was not livable. Within 12, it was barely habitable. Within 24 hours, only a stubborn SOB like me was willing to wait it out until the power came back on. It just goes to underscore the complete uselessness of modern housing away from the life support of a reliable power grid.
I am warming up (pun not exactly intended) to the notion of mobility, although I think it has to be tempered with the idea of putting yourself in the best possible position.
-John
Below is a very good cooment to an article I read over on the "Nature Bat's Last" web site:
ReplyDelete... we tend to think of the other side of Hubbert’s curve (google it - in short, available oil) as a gradual descent similar to the way up – that time and history will appear to reverse themselves gradually over decades – that’s the way it is always presented, graphically. This is not true at all. The other side of Hubbert’s curve will be a bit bumpy at first as it is today (the famous “undulating plateau), which is where we are presently – economies going up, supply limits hit, demand destruction, economies recovering briefly, supply limits hit, demand destruction, and on and on, but ever more frequently and always on an overall downward slope. In the meantime, even during the economic low points, we are, as a huge globalised civilisation, using enormous quantities of resources, esp fossil fuels, fresh water, minerals, metal ores and arable soil. As an example, during the last demand destruction cycle, oil production decreased less than 5%. Why? Because 7 billion people depend on oil every day of their lives – we eat it, drink it, sleep in it, clean with it, medicate ourselves with it, and commute to work with it.
As oil productivity enters terminal decline, prices will spike hugely, and the economies will enter a stage of severe contraction. This is where all the bad things start happening – wars, die-offs, supply disruptions, sudden food supply disruptions, and the breakdown of transport, among many, many other symptoms. When that happens, I think you are going to find that Hubbert’s curve takes on a much more ominous shape – not a gradual slope on the other side corresponding to the way up, but a sudden and vicious drop, as manufacturing, industrial agriculture, and technology in general take huge hits through inflation, shortages, and lack of humans to keep them going. And when that happens, the whole structure collapses suddenly – within a few years, if we are lucky.
But perhaps I am being a bit on the pessimistic side here. I am certainly open to an argument that says otherwise. Unfortunately, I have heard none yet. It is a truth we cannot seem to grasp or in any way truly accept without threatening everything we think we know about how things really work in today’s world and how utterly dependent upon fossil fuels we are. But this realisation and acceptance MUST happen.
Our common sense of “reality” must be destroyed and re-built based upon new knowledge and a new perspective and the development of a new paradigm, if we are to have any hope of survival as a species. Frankly, I am not optimistic about that.
You won’t be doing anything in your garage. You will be out daily trying to find food and water and fuel (to cook, sterilise and clean) to live another day.
We won’t revert back to the Middle Ages, because we won’t have the knowledge, skills, and easily accessible resources to go back to, and events will overtake us so rapidly that we will lose orientation and chaos will ensue.
We have only to the point that we lose electricity. Then it is over….forever.
Try to get your heads around that word….forever. It’s critically important in order to make one understand that we now need an entirely new way of looking at how we plan for the future – or not. Growth is over. All we know about living life is over. Our civilisation is over. Nearly all of us are dead men walking. We must face that if we are to find a way to survive in the coming new world.
Unfortunately, there's not enough forest left in the continental U.S. or most other parts of the industrial world to heat the current population with firewood. We need more and better insulation and heat less space to lower temperatures.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the population will decline. See Russia for that. But it's not pleasant, and the transition will be "interesting".
Glenn
Below is a very good cooment to an article I read over on the "Nature Bat's Last" web site:
ReplyDelete... we tend to think of the other side of Hubbert’s curve as a gradual descent similar to the way up – that time and history will appear to reverse themselves gradually over decades – that’s the way it is always presented, graphically. This is not true at all. The other side of Hubbert’s curve will be a bit bumpy at first as it is today (the famous “undulating plateau), which is where we are presently – economies going up, supply limits hit, demand destruction, economies recovering briefly, supply limits hit, demand destruction, and on and on, but ever more frequently and always on an overall downward slope. In the meantime, even during the economic low points, we are, as a huge globalised civilisation, using enormous quantities of resources, esp fossil fuels, fresh water, minerals, metal ores and arable soil. As an example, during the last demand destruction cycle, oil production decreased less than 5%. Why? Because 7 billion people depend on oil every day of their lives – we eat it, drink it, sleep in it, clean with it, medicate ourselves with it, and commute to work with it.
As oil productivity enters terminal decline, prices will spike hugely, and the economies will enter a stage of severe contraction. This is where all the bad things start happening – wars, die-offs, supply disruptions, sudden food supply disruptions, and the breakdown of transport, among many, many other symptoms. When that happens, I think you are going to find that Hubbert’s curve takes on a much more ominous shape – not a gradual slope on the other side corresponding to the way up, but a sudden and vicious drop, as manufacturing, industrial agriculture, and technology in general take huge hits through inflation, shortages, and lack of humans to keep them going. And when that happens, the whole structure collapses suddenly – within a few years, if we are lucky.
(continued below)
(continued from above)
ReplyDeleteBut perhaps I am being a bit on the pessimistic side here. I am certainly open to an argument that says otherwise. Unfortunately, I have heard none yet. It is a truth we cannot seem to grasp or in any way truly accept without threatening everything we think we know about how things really work in today’s world and how utterly dependent upon fossil fuels we are. But this realisation and acceptance MUST happen.
Our common sense of “reality” must be destroyed and re-built based upon new knowledge and a new perspective and the development of a new paradigm, if we are to have any hope of survival as a species. Frankly, I am not optimistic about that.
You won’t be doing anything in your garage. You will be out daily trying to find food and water and fuel (to cook, sterilise and clean) to live another day.
We won’t revert back to the Middle Ages, because we won’t have the knowledge, skills, and easily accessible resources to go back to, and events will overtake us so rapidly that we will lose orientation and chaos will ensue.
We have only to the point that we lose electricity. Then it is over….forever.
Try to get your heads around that word….forever. It’s critically important in order to make one understand that we now need an entirely new way of looking at how we plan for the future – or not. Growth is over. All we know about living life is over. Our civilisation is over. Nearly all of us are dead men walking. We must face that if we are to find a way to survive in the coming new world.
Hi. I'll join formally in the future and create a signature here, but for now i just wanted to state my agreement on the importance of this topic.
ReplyDeleteFor all north americans living north of Louisiana and east of the lower west coast, winter is going to be the big kill off or cull in the future without a working grid.
Somehow, Native Americans survived in North America without a continent-wide electrical grid.
ReplyDeleteNot so many of them as we have living here now, though...
The American Indians often had a hard time of dealing with winter, themselves, and they were at a much lower population density, even before the arrival of Europeans. I would expect that if we reached a "tipping point event" -- something that precipitated a fast crash -- you would see a rapid depletion of wood and game as people started looking for anything they could find to eat and keep warm. Of course, that in turn would be followed by mass starvation as the natural systems would not be able to provide resources as the needed levels.
ReplyDeleteHas anyone looked into the old "Whole Earth Catalog" so that it's used as a resource and we're not re-inventing the wheel, as it were, on all the subjects on which knowledge is necessary to survive?
ReplyDeleteLiving at mid-continent 45th parallel is akin to Siberia. It was -14 degrees F this morning. Getting the cattle in last night at -7 made my face ache in minutes. We were snowed in for five days last week due to blizzards impossible to travel through. Even our interstate highway system was closed "indefinitely." Now open of course.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet- some of the oldest human remains have been found here dating from immediately after the last ice age -- 10,000 yrs ago.
Our farm was settled by Scandanavians over 100 yrs ago and is even by today's standards remote and isolated. Our county was one of the last in the US to get electricity-- my elders remember those days. They were hard. Without electricity we would be in trouble. But we heat entirely with a wood boiler and are putting up a wind turbine that can generate enough power for 15 farms our size. Granted- as soon as part wear out, we'd be in trouble without replacements.
There are still some residual skills- dairymen, livestock husbandry, growing food, preserving it. An ethic of education and agrarian populist ideas of fairness are strong. And yet ... we are losing people every year. Have lost 50% of our population in the last 30 years. The census will not be kind to my county.
Point is... there is among us a saving remnant. Hopefully.
I remember the old Whole Earth Catalog. With the existence (probably temporary) of the web, some of the resources listed in there might still be accessible.
ReplyDeleteAs for living in -- what, North Dakota, I'd guess? -- I have always been surprised at the adaptability of the human species. I think probably the two most extreme environments on Earth are the Arctic and the Kalahari desert, yet both have held human life for a long, long time. While I don't think that the majority of people living today would be able to function effectively if the lights went out, I think that you are correct that there are still enough people who would be able to adapt and survive that we would see humans thriving even in nominally inhospitable places.
I don't think we have to worry about having the grid go down at once and staying down forever. I do think that what will happen is that prices for electricity (and other forms of energy) will keep going up and up. One will loose the ability to pay for it before the "grid down for good" scenario happens.
ReplyDeleteI also would not be surprised to see partial grid failures (e.g. rolling brownouts, longer and longer times to make fixes and repairs, etc) happing on a more frequent basis as individuals (and society as a whole) loose the ability to fund and maintain the grid at the level we've become used to.
So....think Bangladesh, not Mad Max.
Bangladesh still has grid power, 100% all the time for the top 5% of elites (using their own backup systems for when the main grid is down). The group below the top elites (don't know the exact percent , but lets say the next 15% of the population) who have the means to pay their electric bill.... they have electricity when the grid is up for them, and they do without when it's down. This could be for so many hours daily, etc. So that's the 20% of the population who has access to electricity, more or less either all the time, or most (or a lot) of the time. The other 80% mostly do without or only have access when they go somewhere that has it. They see and benefit from electric lights, have radios, watch tv's (not their own, maybe down at the market) etc. but for them there is not a light switch and a power outlet in every room. So, not Mad Max by any stretch imagination.