“Now everyone in the peak oil community has their project, and their particular niche. Some folks chase down the data, deal with media or start up this project or that – and there’s so much to do that I personally can’t help but be grateful to everyone. Here’s what I’ve been doing – in the simplest possible terms, I looked at the scale of the problem, and I looked at our response (not much so far), and I came, broadly, to this conclusion. We might screw it up. Oh, it is possible that I’m underestimating human ingenuity, and that we’ll do everything right. On the other hand, it seemed like having some kind of contingency plan for a scenario in which we did not replace all our energy infrastructure rapidly, where we did face tight supplies, volatile prices and perhaps an economic depression, in part created by our situation was a good idea.
So that’s what I’ve been doing all along – at the same time that I nightly pray that we’ll get our act together, my own relationship to this (since the other best cure for worry, besides goats, is action) is to get as many people, and communities, neighborhoods and other groups ready to deal with less energy, less wealth, less security as possible. And I have to say, learning that the decline rate is 9.1% makes me feel that my strategy has mostly been the right one. Because that’s a huge and shocking number – we’re already running as fast as we can to keep in place. We can reduce our demand some (in fact, it seems that the economic situation will probably do that), and we can increase our investment as much as possible, given the constraints of our debt and resources. But in the end, we’re probably going to have to make our transition to new energy supplies more gradually than most of us like or are prepared for. We’re probably going to have to make do with a lot less.”
