June 30th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller
Jeff Rubin
(Random House)
ISBN: 978-0-307-35751-9

The premise is simple: there is a finite amount of oil in the world and pretty much everything we consume relies on it. Therefore, as oil supplies dwindle, everything is going to start getting a whole lot more expensive.

Your groceries? Shipped from California and New Zealand. Your consumer electronics goods? Shipped from China and Asia. And the shipping boats and cargo planes they come over on use a cubic assload of fuel. Jeff Rubin’s prediction is that as the cost of fuel rises, the cost of shipping those goods will also rise to the point where it is simply more cost-effective to make them domestically.

But while he asserts that industry will start to come home, that’s not as small as he thinks your world is going to get. The most obvious side effect of expensive oil is expensive gas. Driving will start to become untenable; plane flights almost unthinkable. We, as a world, will return in many regards to the situation over 100 years ago when most people stuck close to home. Vacations were had in your own province or state and not in a different hemisphere. We aren’t going to reach a point where the gas runs out and we turn to a Road Warrior-esque standard of living (not in our lifetimes, anyway, all you Lord Humunguses-in-training), but our lives will be less luxurious and more spare.

And if that were the only thing Rubin had to say on the matter, he probably could have condensed it into a long-ish essay without too much of a problem, but he has also taken pains to explain everything in depth and make connections to things that you may not have automatically assumed were associated with the problem of peak oil, i.e. that the underlying cause for the financial crash last year wasn’t subprime mortgages, but in fact oil prices. And that leads to the double-edged sword of going in-depth on financial issues. Rubin needs to do it, because various fiduciary concepts are central to his arguments, but in doing so he creates sections of the book that are bone dry. I’m interested in what he has to say—deeply interested—but you just cannot make talk about inflation gripping. To his credit, he tries, and he has crafted an otherwise very readable book, but in order to get across various ideas connected with the forces at play he needed to explain some economic concepts which do not make for a breezy read. They’re not impenetrable, but they do require extra effort to assimilate and often bring the pace of the book to a screeching halt.

The other problem with talking about economic concepts is that it’s hard to objectively evaluate what he’s saying. “Oil caused the financial crash last year,” he proclaims. “Here’s why!” And what he says sounds right, but since I have no background in economics I can’t actually assess it with any degree of confidence. Still, his background in economic journalism makes for a more even-keeled book and its tone is much more grounded and practical and less hysterical than many of the other “surviving peak oil” books on the market these days.

Economics aside, though, most of his basic arguments are basically unassailable, like:

- “The key to downsizing the role of oil in our economy is micro decisions made every day by households and consumers, not macro decisions made at the level of monetary or fiscal policy.” (Because while fiscal policy is incredibly important, none of the decisions made at the top is going to have lasting significance if we keep consuming goods and energy at the same rate we always have.)
- “Figuring out how to get the most out of what we have at our disposal is going to be the key to adapting to a smaller world, and that applies to assets like infrastructure and trained workforces more than anything else.” (Which will come into play as we switch to a more locally-produced economy and our former-barista friends and neighbours figure out what other skills they have to contribute to it.)

One of the main arguments in the book—not explicitly delineated, but made plain in the subtext—is that we can choose now to reduce our energy consumption and move toward a local-based economy as individuals or we can have the decision made forcibly for us at some point down the road when it’s much less convenient. Nothing we do is going to make moving into a post-peak oil world entirely painless, but shifting toward a sustainable lifestyle now will make your life—maybe all of our lives—easier in the future.

June 24th, 2009 by Chris Eng

So, I should probably explain to you all that I’m a crow. Not THE Crow. I’m not Brandon Lee and I’m not sitting around in my makeup and black clothes listening to Nine Inch Nails as I type this. But I do get distracted by shiny things. Or, closer to the point, I get fixated on one or two things at a time and if something comes along to supercede my interest, I’ll focus on that at the expense of other things I want or need to be doing.

Case in point: there was a secret I mentioned in my last blog entry. Well, it never quite resolved itself to the point where I could talk about it, and the actual secret (not to mention the secrecy involved) more or less took over most of my waking thoughts, to the detriment of my blog (among other things). The secret is this:

Carla and I were going to move back to Victoria—possibly in fairly short order. See, around the time of my grandpa’s funeral I got to reconnect with a lot of my family and friends in my hometown, many of whom I haven’t had much of a chance to talk to over the last several years. And it was nice. On top of that, Carla was really fed up with certain things that were going on at her job and she wasn’t sure that she wanted to continue with it if that’s the way things were going. So we started debating about whether we needed to be in Vancouver over the next few years, and we couldn’t come up with a good reason why we should. I mean, if it’s all about paying down our debts and saving, we could do that pretty much anywhere. If it’s a matter of our friends in Vancouver, Carla has a few good friends that she would miss very much, but most of my close friends are moving or have moved away. And as for the things that both of us moved here for in the first place, well, neither of us goes out to the bar much anymore and all of our favourite restaurants/stores in town seem to be falling prey to gentrification one by one. We’ll miss the food when we move away—A LOT—but that’s one of the few things.

So, we thought about this between February and March and eventually came up with a game plan that could have seen us moving back to the Rock (as Vancouver Island is affectionately known) as soon as June. A lot of prep-work was done on my end. I basically disassembled my office (which was no big loss, because no writing was getting done in there anyway) and turned it into a storage room, and into that I packed up about twenty boxes of books and other random stuff. I assembled about ten boxes of books for the The Purge IV (I think that’s right—God, I can barely keep track of how many times I’ve gotten rid of books this year) and generally tried to get my possessions into a state whereby if we needed to move with a few weeks notice it wouldn’t kill us.

And I succeeded. Our house isn’t in that bad a shape right now and I have less stuff than at probably any point in the last decade. Plus, things will get slimmer with subsequent cleanings. The problem was that moving wasn’t really something Carla and I could talk about publicly, due to our jobs. I mean, you don’t just go and make announcements about making plans to skip town in a place where your employer can read it.

“Uh, Chris, I wanted to talk to you about your blog and these plans to leave Vancouver.”
“Okay.”
“You know how we’re overstaffed right now?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re fired.”
“Ah. Can you wait to fire me for another few weeks—maybe more—until my plans gel?”
“No.”
“Hm. All right, then.”

It might not have gone exactly like that, but it’s still not the kind of thing you want to be declaring until you’re ready to go public (as it were). So we sat on it and sat on it, and the plans I had for spring kind of disintegrated. I wanted to go and work on the UBC farm, but since all signs pointed to me leaving in fairly short order I decided not to. That decision made me slightly miserable after it became apparent I wasn’t relocating immediately and I missed my chance to work through the entire grow cycle (at least this year, anyway). My depression grew, my responsibilities slid and I bounced from one writing project to another without any real sense of commitment to any of them. My one resolution for the year (look back a few entries and you’ll find it) was to speed ahead full-bore, learn and experience as much as possible, and not stop. Well, I stopped in almost every important regard. I let the indeterminate state of affairs in one area of my life (a fairly large area, but still…) engulf most of the rest of it, and I’m currently paying the price.

The status updates since then are these:

- The factors at Carla’s job that were driving her nuts no longer are. She’s quite enjoying it at the moment.
- I’m moving from the comic shop back to a book store I worked at a couple of years ago (and miss very much). I may stay on for a day or two a week at the comic shop, but that’s up in the air. The book store also knows about my medium-range plans, hence the fact that they’re no longer a secret and I’m talking about them.
- We’re still looking at relocating to Victoria, but it’s not as pressing a concern as it was a few months back.

Taking our time with the relocation means we can be more choosy when searching for jobs in what is essentially a depressed market, and it means we can look for an apartment we might actually want to live in (as opposed to the first one that crosses our path). That’s fantastic, no two ways about it, but now I also have to put the pieces of my shattered plans and resolve back together.

Having the attention span of a crow is great when you’re just leading your regular old geeky lifestyle—it enables you to change course at a moment’s notice and chase after some new and cool thing from halfway ’round the world. In terms of trying to keep your life on track and stick to a course of action that runs contrary to most of your instincts, though—not so good. It’s become clear over the last few months that staying on target is something that will require most of my energy, willpower and determination in order to succeed. It will be hard work. It will most certainly kick my ass on more than one occasion. But it will be worth it in the end, no matter where I end up living.

(Also, as a brief aside, I’m not sure why the website has decided to spontaneously put the sidebar on the bottom of the front page, but I’ll look toward dealing with that when I have a bit more time in the next couple of days. Grrr…)