Be prepared

What are you doing…?

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to start to grow your own food, because you can save money, the quality can be higher, and it’s a good skill, especially to pass on to your children. But you aren’t going to be feeding yourself in some sort of Mad Max scenario. If it comes to that point, your garden won’t be much help.


I don’t think food insecurity will hit the U.S. directly this decade and probably not the next one (except, again, through global political instability). By the 2030s, though, all bets are off (see Must-read NCAR analysis warns we risk multiple, devastating global droughts even on moderate emissions path). I don’t expect the electric grid to become less reliable — the impact of extreme weather will cause havoc locally, but improved technology and growing demand response strategies should in general improve reliability.


Peak oil is another matter, though, and that is worth thinking about and planning for, though, again, most European countries are already paying higher gasoline prices than America is likely to average this decade, so even $7 gasoline isn’t the end of the world, and I’m skeptical we would see that this decade for any length of time (mainly because the global economy would contract first).


My three main suggestions for what people should do in the next few years are:

• Sell your SUV, sooner rather than later, unless you really need all that interior room on a regular basis, since resale prices are certainly going to collapse when gasoline prices sustain at $4 or higher for any length of time. Get a hybrid or, even better, PHEV.
• If you live in a 100-year flood plain, move. You can wait for housing prices to recover a bit, but the risks here are just going to keep growing.
• Plan to sell your coastal property, especially if you live anywhere between Manhattan and Corpus Christi (and thus also have to worry about hurricanes). Coastal property values are going to crash at some point (see “What year will coastal property values crash?“) I think the peak in prices come some time in the 2020s. Coastal property values crash long before you actually get the devastating sea level rise (SLR). They crash when a large fraction of the financial community and of opinion-makers — along with a smaller but substantial fraction of the public — realize that it is too late for us to stop 4 to 5 feet of SLR. The staggering success of the fossil-fuel-funded disinformation campaign — and the ongoing lameness of the media — may put off that awareness a few years, but I still think the peak comes by the mid- to late-2020s.

Great article. The article also mentions paul Gilding and his new book called The Great Disruption.

Gilding, former director of Greenpeace International and now on the faculty at Cambridge University™s Program for Sustainable Leadership, proposes that global warming is just one piece of an impending planetary collapse caused by our overuse of resources. According to the Global Footprint Network, we surpassed Earth™s capacity in 1988, and by 2009, we needed the resources of 1.4 planets to sustain our economy—and any increases in efficiencies that some claim will solve the problem are likely only to encourage us to use more. Gilding argues that, like addicts who need to hit bottom, we energy users will deny our problem until we œface head-on the risk of collapse, but when we do, we will address the emergency with the commitment of our response to WWII and begin a real transformation to a sustainable economy built on equality, quality of life, and harmony with the ecosystem.

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