Peak oil preparation - July 9

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Peak oil: crisis alters lifestyles
Morgan Josey Glover, News-Record (Greensboro, North Carolina)
Aaron Newton has a foot in two worlds.

Four days a week, the 33-year-old husband and father of two works as a land planner in Concord.

In his free time, Newton prepares for a time when energy could become unreliable or too expensive for his family.

“I don’t know exactly what is going to happen because I don’t know what that future is going to look like,” Newton said. “It’s important to be flexible.”

Opinions differ among economists, petroleum industry experts and grassroots activists about the challenges that declining oil supplies could present to the American way of life. But across the country, people who believe global oil production will soon peak and go into permanent decline are pushing for a transformation in how we grow food, transport people and build homes.

Newton represents a segment of Americans who now envision their lives in a post-peak world. Below, the Newton family and other North Carolinians share their stories:

Straddling the ages

Jennifer Newton never imagined that at age 35 she would eat out of a dorm-size refrigerator, grow unfamiliar produce in her backyard or discuss electricity-free kitchens with her husband. But now, much of the Newton household revolves around making it less dependent on fossil fuels, especially when it comes to diet.
(8 July 2008)
Article has a nice sidebar: Ready for Peak Oil?
Preparing for a decline in oil supplies requires long-term emotional, financial and physical adjustments. Here are five ways to get started...

Planner's bleak vision for Gold Coast
Geoff Chambers, Goldcoast.com (Australia)
TOWN planner Roger Brewster has slammed the Federal Government's climate change report for avoiding the oil crisis.

The former president of the Royal Planning Institute said the report by Professor Ross Garnaut had ignored the long-term effect on food prices and overcrowded cities, which could have a flow-on effect on the Gold Coast economy.

Mr Brewster said the Gold Coast was in serious danger of becoming an economic backwater.

"The coming global economic turmoil could take care of a lot of growth pressure, as many people rediscover the value of living in self-sustaining regional communities -- a move to coastal regional towns such as Bundaberg," said Mr Brewster.

"Fortunately, the Gold Coast is a city of smallish towns that can be reorganised as urban villages, emphasising the mixed-use public transport-oriented development that is a feature of the city's activity centres."

The Surfers Paradise resident said the report had avoided the oil crisis.

"It does not go far enough to examine the related equally scary issues associated with peak oil and future oil depletion," he said.
(9 July 2008)

Economic chill looms heavy over Ireland, Vancouver
Barry Link, Vancouver Courier
Warning signs ignored by many spend-crazy British Columbians
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"You guys should stop spending money on gadgets," said my father to my brother and me last week. My brother was examining my sleek, video and wireless-enabled MP3 player.

"You're going to need your money for gasoline and food."

My father, in his 80s, doesn't understand why my brother and I are interested in sleek, video and wireless-enabled MP3 players. But he also went through the Depression, the unimaginably bleak 1930s which as far as post-millennial public collective memory goes might as well have been the 1830s. Having grown up on a farm where the family at least had food but no cash, Dad is intimately acquainted with scarcity. His warning about an impending need for thrift, a notion also long disappeared from collective memory, is part of an increasing unease in the land about our economic future. Canadians are wondering if they should be scared.

... If we're headed to a peak-oil meltdown and a reduced standard of living my father would recognize from 70 years ago, no one--from Galway to Gibsons--is preparing for it.
(9 July 2008)