I'm seriously spooked and switching to preparations

[krakknisse]

For what it's worth: I'm seriously spooked. I read LATOC and worry. Suffice to say, I'm making my preparations. Peak oil is absolutely f*cking everywhere now. It's only a matter of time before J6P finds out and then prepping supplies (acres!) will be difficult. Confidence in the financial system will be shredded.

I'm getting my acres and my seeds and safety devices. No serious career or relocation decisions yet, but it's an option that I will continuously review. Won't be spending so much time on ITulip I think. This thing has got to crash sometime, in some fashion, sooner or later. I've made my investments (with good ITulip insights and friendly laughs).

For those of you who like to wander off in Googleland, try just one search: "peak wood". I know, just laugh. But read the first and the second hits.

I hope my significant other will laugh at it in 10 years time, saying it was just my funny hobby.

Any others here feel the same way?

[Rajiv]

Re: I'm seriously spooked and switching to preparations

If you are thinking of farming, look at the video "Secret of El Dorado" - then google "biochar" - then google "John Jeavons and Ecology Action"

May help you utilize your acres more usefully

[raja]

Re: I'm seriously spooked and switching to preparations

For what it's worth: I'm seriously spooked. I read LATOC and worry. Suffice to say, I'm making my preparations. Peak oil is absolutely f*cking everywhere now. It's only a matter of time before J6P finds out and then prepping supplies (acres!) will be difficult. Confidence in the financial system will be shredded.

I'm getting my acres and my seeds and safety devices. No serious career or relocation decisions yet, but it's an option that I will continuously review. Won't be spending so much time on ITulip I think. This thing has got to crash sometime, in some fashion, sooner or later. I've made my investments (with good ITulip insights and friendly laughs).

For those of you who like to wander off in Googleland, try just one search: "peak wood". I know, just laugh. But read the first and the second hits.

I hope my significant other will laugh at it in 10 years time, saying it was just my funny hobby.

Any others here feel the same way?

Yes, I'm feeling the same way.

I'm preparing for several possible scenarios, one of which includes growing my own food. We moved to a small farm, spent lots making the house energy efficient, and now setting up small livestock and grain/vegetable growing for self-sufficiency.

Luckily, I'm retired, so I've got the time and money to do this. Like you, I'm also hoping I don't have to become a real farmer, and it will turn out to be a just fun hobby.

[Jay]

Re: I'm seriously spooked and switching to preparations

For what it's worth: I'm seriously spooked. I read LATOC and worry. Suffice to say, I'm making my preparations. Peak oil is absolutely f*cking everywhere now. It's only a matter of time before J6P finds out and then prepping supplies (acres!) will be difficult. Confidence in the financial system will be shredded.

I'm getting my acres and my seeds and safety devices. No serious career or relocation decisions yet, but it's an option that I will continuously review. Won't be spending so much time on ITulip I think. This thing has got to crash sometime, in some fashion, sooner or later. I've made my investments (with good ITulip insights and friendly laughs).

For those of you who like to wander off in Googleland, try just one search: "peak wood". I know, just laugh. But read the first and the second hits.

I hope my significant other will laugh at it in 10 years time, saying it was just my funny hobby.

Any others here feel the same way?

Interesting stuff. I would add as a counter point that if you click on the PDF link by a guy named Clayton Cramer who is quoted in the peak wood story, he says nothing about peak wood, and believes that the end of the Bronze Age had more to do with a tin shortage from trade route disruption. I know nothing about this issue, I just find it interesting that if you follow the link given as supporting evidence it takes you down a separate road with obviously different implications.

[krakknisse]

Re: I'm seriously spooked and switching to preparations

Interesting stuff. I would add as a counter point that if you click on the PDF link by a guy named Clayton Cramer who is quoted in the peak wood story, he says nothing about peak wood, and believes that the end of the Bronze Age had more to do with a tin shortage from trade route disruption. I know nothing about this issue, I just find it interesting that if you follow the link given as supporting evidence it takes you down a separate road with obviously different implications.

Well, just writing this takes time off from my preps. But here goes: the result of Bronze Age deforestation is bleeding obvious! Both this and this show this. The national flag of Lebanon is the cedar tree - but where is it now?

But perhaps the most famous documentation of the shortage of wood around the ancient Mediterranean is the Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest epic poetry that has survived. ...

Stripped of sex and violence, the Gilgamesh epic is about deforestation. ... It's clear that the geography and climate of southern Mesopotamia would not provide the wood fuel to support a Bronze Age civilization that worked metal, built large cities, and constructed canals and ceremonial centers that used wood, plaster, and bricks. ...
Theodore Wertime suggested that massive deforestation of the eastern Mediterranean began about 1200 BC, for construction, lime kilning, and ore smelting. Probably it began earlier in the drier regions further east. King Hammurabi's laws (around 1750 BC) carried the death penalty for unauthorized felling of trees in Mesopotamia. The problem may have been even worse in intensive metal-working regions like Anatolia. Metal smelting and forging had been going on in Anatolia for at least 3000 years by 1200 BC. ...
The crisis in wood continued to plague Athens. By 313 BC the only available ship timber in or close to Greece itself was in the far northern forests of Thrace and Macedonia: overseas supplies had to come from the Black Sea coasts, southern Turkey, Lebanon, or Italy. By the 4th century BC it was no longer economic to transport charcoal overland and uphill to the mines at Laurion: instead, the ore was smelted down on the coast, and charcoal was shipped in on barges.

I don't want to fill up ITulip with ravings about peak oil and civilizational collapse. Suffice to say, the probability of uncomfortable disruptions is no longer low enough to ignore. I second EJ's call on an alt energy bubble. Alternative energy is bound to happen. It is just that it is going to be horribly expensive to replace cheap fossil fuel. A quickie napkin calculation shows that. Solar insolation is around 1000 W/m2 - maximal. World energy consumption is 10^18 watts. Fossil fuels supply 86% of that. Average household electrical energy consumption around here is 17*10^3 kilowatthours (abundant hydro power here). Replacing that with solar will take around 121 square meters of solar photovoltaics, at a cost of $200,000. Even using a combo of micro-hydro power, passive solar, solar thermal for heating and photovoltaics for minimal electricity, is going to leave you short. And even that does not count in the problem of transportation.

And duuh - how much fossil fuel do you need to make all those alt energy sources? Get them while you can. And learn to live with less energy.

[Jay]

Re: I'm seriously spooked and switching to preparations

Well, just writing this takes time off from my preps. But here goes: the result of Bronze Age deforestation is bleeding obvious! Both this and this show this. The national flag of Lebanon is the cedar tree - but where is it now?


I don't want to fill up ITulip with ravings about peak oil and civilizational collapse. Suffice to say, the probability of uncomfortable disruptions is no longer low enough to ignore. I second EJ's call on an alt energy bubble. Alternative energy is bound to happen. It is just that it is going to be horribly expensive to replace cheap fossil fuel. A quickie napkin calculation shows that. Solar insolation is around 1000 W/m2 - maximal. World energy consumption is 10^18 watts. Fossil fuels supply 86% of that. Average household electrical energy consumption around here is 17*10^3 kilowatthours (abundant hydro power here). Replacing that with solar will take around 121 square meters of solar photovoltaics, at a cost of $200,000. Even using a combo of micro-hydro power, passive solar, solar thermal for heating and photovoltaics for minimal electricity, is going to leave you short. And even that does not count in the problem of transportation.

And duuh - how much fossil fuel do you need to make all those alt energy sources? Get them while you can. And learn to live with less energy.

Easy my man, I'm just fleshing the issue out not standing on a stump.
Oh, hey what are your preparations? I don't have the ability to buy a farm right now and am stuck in a small city (not a financial limitation anyway), suggestions? I have some bullion, both gold and silver, a tazer and about 2-3 months of food. That and fists of fury!;)
Should we have a SHTF thread with tin foil preparation suggestions?

[Basil]

Re: I'm seriously spooked and switching to preparations

I think a SHTF thread and proposals for different preparations would a very good idea. It is good to discuss this with sane people, who realize that it is a matter of preparation, and will avoid tin hat doom and gloom rantings.

My wife and I have developed a GTFO (Get the @*&% out) package (water, food, PMs, and I may get a firearm) and have bicycles to ride out of the city. We now live in Boston. I had acreage in VA but sold at the peak b/c even I knew the price of land was not supposed to triple in three years. But with a baby and a toddler and little experience in such matters, it is difficult to know exactly what kind of plans one should make. I would like to hear what, if anything, others have done or contemplated doing.

Basil

[bart]

Re: I'm seriously spooked and switching to preparations

...
But with ... little experience in such matters, it is difficult to know exactly what kind of plans one should make. I would like to hear what, if anything, others have done or contemplated doing.

I'm uncomfortable with going into any specifics on what I've done or am doing, but my real suggestion for anyone is to educate themselves on what has happened in this and other countries like Weimar Germany or Argentina about 6 years ago.
Also consider and list out what the real basics and minimums are in one's current life, and also consider how wise the "Be prepared" Boy Scout motto is.

Education is always amongst the very top things in which to invest.

[sn1p3r]

Re: I'm seriously spooked and switching to preparations

Hi, first post...I finally got my select and thought I would weigh in on something that interests me.

I've been hearing about this stuff since before Red Dawn hit the big screen (I'm younger but have a paranoid father) and I can honestly say that the last year is the most serious I have ever considered the possibility of some level of financial and civil collapse.

A book I recently finished takes this to an extreme but contains plenty of good information and oddly enough occurs due to a credit crunch and financial collapse.

http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bo...p?bookid=35549

I will say that getting prepared for hard times has been one of the most liberating exercises for me...

[Rajiv]

Re: I'm seriously spooked and switching to preparations

See also this article - Engineering A Global Food Crisis: The Hardship Will Be Widespread

Home gardens throughout the UK have been destroyed. Leaves on tomato plants are curling and potatoes are deformed, carrots, peas, lettuce all deemed inedible and the timing couldn't’t be worse. Last week it was being reported that people were stealing vegetables right from their neighbors garden because of the increase of food prices.



A high volume of calls have been coming into the Pesticides Safety Directorate and so far it looks as though the problem with thousands of peoples gardens comes from fertilizer. “Manure that came from animals that were eating grass treated with a hormone based herbicide called aminopyralid, found in products made by Dow AgroSciences and used on grassland to control weeds.”

It is not safe to use on food crops, but its fine for animals to eat, then its okay for us to eat them (and the herbicide inside of them). The hormone based herbicide has gone through a long process, first the digestive systems of the animals, then out with the manure, which takes months to “mature” (ready to use as fertilizer) and after people have used it in their garden the soil is contaminated, the herbicide is still potent enough to kill the plants and it is even advised that you wait to replant anything in that soil for at least a year, maybe longer. Rendering peoples land useless for gardening…until further notice

[krakknisse]

Re: I'm seriously spooked and switching to preparations

Easy my man, I'm just fleshing the issue out not standing on a stump.
Oh, hey what are your preparations? I don't have the ability to buy a farm right now and am stuck in a small city (not a financial limitation anyway), suggestions? I have some bullion, both gold and silver, a tazer and about 2-3 months of food. That and fists of fury!;)
Should we have a SHTF thread with tin foil preparation suggestions?

Sorry, I'm getting nervous. Jay, Basil, bart, sn1p3r, rajiv, raja: big sigh of relief seeing that I'm not the only ITuliper that is thinking about preparations other than financials. I know EJ says "don't be a doomer". But I'm afraid that even he will have to reconsider. The probability of a pretty significant decline in total energy consumption within my lifetime, and especially the lifetime of significant others, is now escalating. I still hope that somehow, somewhere a new Magic Bullet technology will appear. But let's face it, oil is extremely hard to replace with renewables. I'll be reviewing my "life portfolio", making further adjustments in the direction of doomishness as required.

You all probably have better preps than I do. You all know what the most important element in a financial portfolio is, as well as the last stand safety enhancing technology. Can't, won't say more. I try to be opaque here, but you get the gist of it.

The most important element of my preps is acquiring skills and experience in self-suffiency. You can't eat metal. Your doom stash may be unavailable to you, looted or not last long enough. Victory gardens provided a significant proportion of produce consumption in the Anglophile countries during WW2. So I'm doing some small scale stuff in that area. Also, keep close to your family.

Look up Orlov's story on the Soviet collapse:

Shortly before the Soviet Union’s collapse, it became known informally that the ten percent of farmland allocated to kitchen gardens (in meager tenth of a hectare plots) accounted for some 90 percent of domestic food production. During and after the economic collapse, with the government stores quite uncontaminated by food, and often closed altogether, these plots became lifesavers for many families. The summer of 1990 particularly stands out in my mind: it was the summer when we ate nothing but rice (imported), zucchini (grown by us) and fish (from a local lake, caught by some neighbors).

I'm revisiting some rural elements of my past. If TSHTF, I have at least one acre, maybe two. Keep one tank of gasoline on standby, so I can get there. Will probably starve or die there anyways, with poor skills and experience. So I'm really wracking my brain on how to develop that location without making really significant life-changing choices.

Of course, my significant other thinks I'm absolutely crazy. Sigh.

BTW, I haven't posted anything on Iran here, but let's say the tension is rising. New moon is next Thursday. The probability of that being "it" is low, but it could be a next leg down for oil-based civilization.

[sn1p3r]

Re: I'm seriously spooked and switching to preparations

Should be able to find plenty of knowledge, info is cheap these days and in the absence of that at least make sure you have items to trade for the knowledge you lack. The example I always hear is silver but I bet gas/ammo/food/etc will be a hot commodity. Check out survivalblog.com

[bart]

Re: I'm seriously spooked and switching to preparations

I know EJ says "don't be a doomer".

In my opinion, there is a large difference between a "real" doomer and just plain being prepared. For example, anyone living in an earthquake zone who doesn't have some extra water and food, etc. in both their car and home is imprudent at best.

There was a large contingent in 1974, 1979 and 1999 who expected very dire and dark scenarios worldwide and made extreme preparations... and were wrong. I don't want to de-emphasize the very real negative issues ahead nor discourage anyone not to take what they consider wise preparations and actions, but rather to urge perspective and especially education & research.

[krakknisse]

Re: I'm seriously spooked and switching to preparations

In my opinion, there is a large difference between a "real" doomer and just plain being prepared. For example, anyone living in an earthquake zone who doesn't have some extra water and food, etc. in both their car and home is imprudent at best.

There was a large contingent in 1974, 1979 and 1999 who expected very dire and dark scenarios worldwide and made extreme preparations... and were wrong. I don't want to de-emphasize the very real negative issues ahead nor discourage anyone not to take what they consider wise preparations and actions, but rather to urge perspective and especially education & research.

Yes, thanks for pointing that out. I know about these "back to the land" movements. Getting out of Dodge 20-30 years too early meant that you wouldn't be able to live a live of absolute luxury (historically) for a few decades. For me, it is a question of having reasonable preparations in place. Skills are relatively cheap - it will be my little hobby. And also, hanging on to some agricultural land that will float my way for little money. So far, no big sacrifices. But how about getting out of Dodge one year too late? Not so fun, that either.

Doom recipe: Your base will be collapse of confidence in the financial system as your base. Start with a smattering of rich elites and avarice. Add an inkling of overextended government programs and a reduced tax base. Add in a large helping of inflation (to taste). Reduce this mixture to a good concentration of universal bitterness and helplessness. In a separate bowl, start with a gallon of increasing oil prices. Add in a barrel of of universal recognition of declining oil supplies. Last, but not least, add one teaspoon of alternative energy (be careful, it is very expensive). Add the contents of the first bowl to the last. Let it stew for about ten years. Be careful not to let any oppositional steam out, but drain the large choice bits (called truffe de elite) and add to a separate bowl, covering well with a cloth of fascism. Presto: La Bombe Surprise.

[chrisk]

Re: I'm seriously spooked and switching to preparations

IMO, there is absolutely no need to make long-term, survivalist-type preparations because of peak oil (by which I mean things that you'd need for a collapse of civilization, like guns, food, and water). Peak oil does not mean that, say, a week from Friday the world runs out of oil, and everyone panics. Rather, it's a very gradual shift (lasting decades) toward higher and higher oil prices -- which, along the way, will tend to suppress demand as well, making the transition even more gradual.

The world has become very efficient at producing food and water. I don't know the exact figure, but I'm guessing that production of these basic necessities takes less than 5% of GDP, averaged worldwide. So the absolute worst case, I'd say, is that we completely fail to develop any alternative energy sources, but slowly revert toward using a large portion of GDP for production of necessities. Even that seems very unlikely to me. But even if it happens, it will be over decades, not days. No shooting of neighbors will be required.

Now before you write me off as a Cloth Hat Wearer, I should mention that I DO have plenty of preps: freeze dried food, minimal guns and ammo, etc. Why? Because there ARE things that COULD cause panic and near or total societal collapse. The most likely I think is a highly lethal bird flu pandemic. I'd put the chances of that at maybe 1 in 10 in my lifetime, but that's still enough that I want insurance against it. Another possibility would be large scale nuclear terrorism, although I'm less worried about that. Also, I suppose even things that aren't worth panicking over could cause short-term panic (including irrational fears of peak oil), which might feed on itself for a short time of say days or weeks, until government intervention fixed it. Minimal short-term preps are always a good idea just for those kinds of things, IMO. (Bird flu preps OTOH, could be as extreme as you like without being totally irrational. If 50% of the world population dies, just about any nightmare scenario could follow.)