A Prophetic Dream?

My dutiful alarm clock wakes me weekday mornings with the local news radio station. Every day, I’m roused from groggy slumber by voices telling me what’s going on in the world, and it’s not uncommon for the alarm to go off and rant the news for a few minutes (sometimes more than a few) before I’m truly awake. So it shouldn’t be too surprising that occasionally my late-morning dreams will incorporate news reports.

This morning, I awoke after a dream - which in my drowsy state I couldn’t tell was a dream or not - that I had been listening to news about a sudden oil crisis. The world had indeed, finally, without doubt, run out of oil. According to my dream news, 90% of the world’s oilo wells had dried up in the past 4 days, and those that were still trickling had a known deposit which would be running out soon. Governments got involved, measurements were taken from space satellites, prospectors and consultants and geologists confirmed the truth. The world has 900 million gallons of oil left, more or less. After that, that’s it. No more.

Immediately, the price of gas went up to $18 per litre. Then the stations stopped selling altogether as the government took over and confiscated all the gas for use by the military - all that was left for sale was Ethanol, and the government was considering taking that too.

The questions became “what should we do with the amount of oil we have left?”. And then “What do we do now?”

Firstly, all production stopped, everywhere. You have whatever gasoline that’s in your car right now, the stuff that you paid $1.18/L for. You can keep that. The economy has pretty much stopped dead. People can not commute to work. Trucks have stopped trucking. Passenger planes are empty. Deliveries aren’t delivered. Millions of people stay home from work, wondering what they’re going to do with no job, and no gas.

After the initial shock in the population of how much it’ll cost to drive their cars, they realize oh no they can’t drive their cars anymore, then finally the public realized: “oh shit. we need food”. Farmers producing our food can’t afford to run their tractors, so the only food production going on is that which people are willing to harvest manually, using old-fashioned scythes and animal-powered ploughs. And there aren’t too many of those around. Can humans without oil manage to harvest a 1000-acre farm of soy beans? After the riots subside, grocery stores will be empty, and no new deliveries are expected.

It quickly becomes apparent that oil is the magic lubricant which supports our population size. Is it possible to feed a few billion people without oil-consuming machines to do the planting and harvesting? Experts are saying no - fuelling an underground minority of violent genocists - their motto: a lot of us will die off due to starvation, so we’d better pick which ones to keep and start the segregation now. Violent genocide is a minority reaction; most of society either splinters into lone foragers or into solidarity groups who embark upon building some self-suffient, non-oil-reliant communities.

So, that was my dream. When I woke, I was filled with a conviction that the world had just changed. Then I realized as the radio was ranting the traffic and weather report, that it had all been a dream. Yet I continued to think about it. It’s a difficult one to shake off.

Let’s assume (ficticiously) that we could maintain our electric grid on non-oil-based fuels (nuclear, hydroelectric), so we’d still have telephone, internet, radio, lights, TV. People can still communicate with each other, businesses can survive, and despite the utter collapse of the oil economy, money is still used in trade. Schools aren’t closed. Facebook still exists. And you’re still expected to pay your hydro bill, even if you have to ride your horse into town to use the ATM. Not *everything* shuts down - just all the stuff that absolutely requires oil. In reality I realize that a sudden poverty of oil would probably affect these institutions as well, but I want to keep this hypothetical to avoid rehashing the plot lines of bad armageddon movies.

So I ask: What would you do?

• You need to eat. Are you capable of creating your own food? Could you support your family with the bounty of your back yard garden?
• Would you be willing to ride your bike to a farm, and help sustain the argriculture that keeps us fed?
• Would you become vegetarian? vegan? hunter? cannibal?
• What vocation would you turn to?

My answer: yes, instead of building web sites, I’d go do shift work on a community farm. My obligation would be to do sufficient work for public farms to feed myself, my immediate family, and then a little extra. A lot of the things I waste my energy on now would be suddenly, stupidly unimportant. And I already know, decided many years ago, that I’d want to become a beekeeper. And I think we’d survive.

Now consider your answer to that question - consider how would you transform your life if all the oil disappeared. Do you think that day is coming, even if it arrives slowly? Will you be more prepared than your neighbour? Can you make any steps toward a sustainable lifestyle today?