For the first time that I’m aware of, Jaime went the whole day yesterday without ever changing his cotton underwear - it stayed dry all day, and he only used the potty for peeing (and naptime, when he still wears a diaper). Things are going well - now we need to work on the pooping :-) He still doesn’t ask to go potty most of the time. When he does, it’s at times when I usually take him - like morning time and bathtime. Perhaps I should add some more regularity to the schedule.
This weekend we celebrate Jaime’s birthday with a big birthday bash at the Y. We invited many kids and it seems they are all coming! It really should be a fun time.
About 10 months ago I wrote a long note to all my family warning about Peak Oil and about how we should start thinking about taking some action as a family to prepare for the possibility that bad things are likely to happen in the near future (ie, within 5-10 years). What I had in mind at the time was buying a large piece of land in a good location as a sort of family shelter - a place we could all retreat to in the event of losing jobs, finding ourselves stuck in a non-sustainable or otherwise problematic location, a place to grow food, defend ourselves, etc. Of course, choosing the location of such a place would be a big sticking point - everyone thought their own back yard would be best. Objectivity in such a decision is tough.
I also made warnings about the stock market and investments being in danger. Since that time, oil has gone from around $60 to over $90. The dollar has fallen in value considerably - being worth less than a Canadian dollar now ($1 USD = about $.95 CSD). The stock market was gone up and down in the $13,000-14,000 range. At the time, the responses from my family varied from “yeah, we’re all doomed” (my father) to “what you say is true, but human beings are innovative and will discover solutions to these problems” (my brother). Now, after 10 months, the oil situation has slowly heated up without becoming much clearer now than it was. It’s still not clear whether we’ve passed peak oil, though I’m a little more “confident” now than I was that we indeed have passed peak oil. Still, whether Saudi Arabia has spare capacity is uncertain.
But, one thing that has become more clear to me is that we don’t need peak oil to be worried. There’s something called the “export land model” which considers not just peaking oil production, but also increased oil usage by oil exporters. It goes something like this: say Saudi Arabia has peaked and will average 3% declines in production per year. Their economy has been growing fast, and their internal oil usage has been growing at 5%/year. If you combine those two, it results in a decline rate of oil exports of over 8% and that rate increases each year as the amount of oil available to export is squeezed from both above and below. This scenario has already played out in the US (we peaked oil in 1970, but we became a net oil importer earlier than that), in the UK (became a net oil importer 9 years after their peak production year), and Indonesia. This same dynamic is currently playing out in Russia, Mexico, and Iran, and quite possibly Saudi Arabia. If peak oil happened in 2005 as is currently the case, then exports from all these major producers could go to zero in 10 years. They would still be producing oil - even considerable amounts. But their oil would be cheap to them, and the benefit of keeping it is more power and economic growth for themselves. Whereas if they sell all their oil, all they get is money, and as oil runs out, money won’t buy what it used to buy - commodities inflation will be severe.
10 years till the US gets NO MORE OIL from anyone else, except maybe Canada. We’d be stuck with out own domestic production (around 4-5 mbpd, whereas we currently used over 20). Often people respond to peak oil by arguing we’ll get more economical cars - cars that get 40mpg instead of 20. However, cutting our gasoline usage in half in 10 years (a very tall order) would reduce our oil usage from 20 mbpd to about 13 mbpd (because we use about 14mbpd of the 20 for transportation). We’d still be short by 8mbpd, and that’s after paying a huge economic cost to buy an entire new fleet of hybrid and electric vehicles that would then be practically useless to us because we’d still not have enough gas for them. We’d have to do another round of vehicle fleet replacement to build 100% electric vehicles, and then also build the power plants to produce all that extra electricity we’d need for them. It’s a nightmare to me that there is probably no way around the fact that we, as a society, as a country, are going to waste that much time and energy building a lot of crap that will then be so useless to us so quickly. It’s the same story with the ethanol boondoggle - ethanol being a dead end idea that gets us nowhere. Hybrid vehicles are a dead end idea that will get us nowhere. We need to leapfrog to real solutions right away - to building electrified rail for public transport and for freight transport, to building nuclear, wind, and solar power plants for all the electricity we will need. But you can’t get people to make that leap to the real, and somewhat less convenient solutions, unless you get them to recognize the dire need for them.
No outside oil in 10 years time. Is that dire enough for you?
