Tfgray’s Weblog

 Back in the dinosaur days, the Earth was toasty-warm and humid. Plants grew like crazy and the only limit to the size of an animal seemed to be how much it could eat. Then something changed. Something called “the environment.” It got cooler, dryer. Plant growth slowed. Food became scarce. The lower temperatures were less reptile-friendly and more favorable to the warm-blooded critters. Sorry to go all Darwin on you, but giant reptiles were no longer “the fittest.” In fact they didn’t fit at all, and died out.

We’re living in our own version of the dinosaur days. For the past century and a half, oil has kept us toasty-warm. Oh heck, let’s go back to the beginning…

In 1859, Col. Drake figured out how to get “rock oil” (in Latin, “petroleum”) out of the ground in commercially viable quantities. There was a need for it, you see. We’d been lighting our homes with whale oil for centuries and we were running out of whales. The petroleum industry took off like a rocket, well, until Edison. Major industry crisis when electricity, safer than spillable oil or explodable gas, took over the lighting business.

The petroleum guys were resourceful, however, and found lots of other uses for their product: automobiles, the solution to the urban horse shit crisis. Plastic. Heck, they even figured out how to generate electricity by burning oil.

And there was so much of it! Billions of barrels hidden under the ground all over the world!

So we used it. And used it. Have we used it all up? Nowhere close, but there is a teeny weeny problem: we’re getting close to using up the oil that is easy to get to. What’s left is in remote, politically hostile, or environmentally harsh places. American oil production peaked in 1971. Global oil production may have peaked in 2006. What does it all mean?

At the end of World War II, the American colossus bestrode the world. Although we may tell ourselves that it was due to our superior virtue,

[Wait! Must tell story here. A Swedish engineer was working in North Korea, helping to build the Pyonyang subway system. The workers were running 4 watt drills off battery packs. There were four plugs in each 12 volt battery, and the Koreans insisted that they could run four drills off each pack, despite the engineer's insistence that 4 x 3, not 4 x 4 = 12. The Koreans insisted it would work due to their “superior moral virtue.”]

As I was saying:

in reality, it had more to do with three facts: During the war we built factories while other nations were getting theirs bombed into rubble; other than Pearl Harbor, we took virtually no infrastructure damage; and we had the world’s largest oil reserves.

That environment no longer exists. We have been shutting down factories and outsourcing our manufacturing capacity; our infrastructure is crumbling, a victim of budget cuts and misaligned priorities; and our oil reserves now account for 3% of the world’s total.

Now understand that we’ve built our entire economy upon the tarry sands of low oil prices, and that environment hit the skids when Bush 43 took office. Are there people who do well under the current system? Yes, there are, and the more shares they own of major oil companies, the better they are doing. Much of the real trade deficit (buying more from other countries than they are buying from us) is masked by profits returning to American shareholders from businesses who have offshored their manufacturing capacity. If our current economy can be compared to dinosaurs, I would call these folks the top of the food chain, the T. Rexes, if you will, (or T. Rexes from Texas, if you prefer rhyming analogies) and as rich as they are, and as powerful as they are, they are in pure survival mode.

So the question is, fellow mammals, how do we survive in this new environment? The death of the dinosaurs may be fated, and not require our assistance, but they still thrash around a lot in the process. How do we keep from getting squashed?

Share your thoughts. Send me links you find appropriate. I’ll be posting more later.

Well, yes, I am. Did George Bush or government fiscal policy have anything to do with it?

Probably not.

Eight years ago, I was supporting 3 kids. Now they’re grown and supporting themselves.

Eight years ago, my mortgage was around $70K. Now it’s about $13K. Turns out my employer shut down my workplace in 2005. I had to choose: move with my job or stay where I was and find a new one. As it turned out, my job moved to Oregon, a place I’d visited 25 years before and loved. I sold my house, the timing controlled by my workplace closing and my daughter’s graduation. As it turned out, June 2005 was the top of the real estate bubble.

The criteria for the new place were (1) no more than a $25K mortgage and (2) no more than 5 miles from work. We downsized into a smaller house on a smaller lot in a cheaper neighborhood 3.3 miles from my job and 3.5 from my husband’s. (Our previous commute was 40 miles a day each, in opposite directions. )

We always gardened, but now we are more interested in maximizing yields and putting up produce. The new place has an apple and a plum tree, and we’ve planted two dwarf pears. Our next major investment will be $200 for a small chest freezer, and in the spring, about twice that for a lean-to greenhouse for the south side of the house. Our first major investment, which we paid off this month, was upgrading the windows to state of the art. We use about half the firewood of other households in our neighborhood.

Yes, firewood. We couldn’t heat with wood in the old house, but this one has a fireplace with a fairly efficient insert, definitely a selling point from our perspective. Since my husband works in landscaping, wood follows him home (in the back of his pickup truck) on a fairly regular basis. As in the previous house, we have a timer on the thermostat. The furnace kicks on just before I get up, and kicks off an hour later, when my husband waltzes out the door to walk the dog. Whoever gets home first starts the fire.

The rest of the time, the thermostat is set at 60 degrees. During cold weather we bank the fire at night. Daytime, we open the shades on the south side in the winter; we close them in the summer. When it’s hot, we use fans rather than air conditioning. The windows keep the temp consistently 19 degrees cooler than the outside temp. In cold weather, the furnace, outside of that one hour in the morning, comes on infrequently. Our worst natural gas bill so far? $62, in February ‘06, the month that natural gas prices mysteriously doubled. (Just for comparison, the monthly bill in the summer, when only the pilot light runs, is $16. There’s a minimum fee and some taxes and whatnot that account for much of it.)

Eight years ago, in a house heated with oil–the price of which has nearly quadrupled since–we ran about $300 a year. Our oil company would sell contracts. We would estimate how many gallons we needed, pay our heating bill in July and then settle up for the difference the following spring. The company stopped offering contracts in 2004. Oil prices had gotten too volatile and they could no longer guarantee the price.

Am I doing better? Yes, I think I am, but I’ve been lucky. Without that fortuitous job-related move, I’d be looking at making mortgage payments until I was 82. My husband and I would be burning about 3 gallons of gas a day between us, instead of 3-4 a week total. My home heating bill would be at the mercy of Big Oil, speculators and Arabs.

I’m lucky. My kids are a blessing. Every day at work I hear co-workers talking about their kids’ problems with school, drugs, the law, and whether they’re on the right meds. Mine, knock wood, are doing ok. Luck has a lot to do with my being better off, as does making every effort possible to conserve energy and become self-sufficient in food and energy.

Some people wouldn’t see me as being better off. I’m in a smaller house in a more modest neighborhood, driving a used compact car. I get my hands dirty in the garden and slice and dice and pickle and stew. I sweat and watch my hair frizz as I put quarts of dills and bread and butter pickles in the hot water bath. I stack firewood while my husband swings an axe. To some people, this is a giant step backward, a fearsome reversal of the eternally upward trend of the American economy.

To me, it’s just that the lifestyle I’d aspired to, so demonized as “Hippy” in the Sixties and Seventies, happens to be working out just fine.

I was listening to the news today, and heard many Republicans cackling over Obama’s suggestion that we could use less oil by keeping our tires properly inflated. Let’s leave aside all the stuff from sources as diverse as NASCAR and the Department of Energy that agrees with Senator O.

Has anyone noticed that the Democrat is urging people to help solve their own problems while the Republicans are telling us to forget about personal responsibility and let the big boys take care of it?

Just asking.