Repost: Oil Apocalypse Blogs #2

A continuing series. I answer more questions about the books and the research behind them.

What is the scariest aspect of the end of oil?

In my opinion? Food. Our just-in-time food delivery system depends entirely on petroleum. Starving people may not remain pleasant people, especially not when they live in the concentrations of today’s urban centers. England’s little glitch back 10 years ago that resulted in the “nine meals from anarchy” talk gave us a hint of what may well happen at the start of such an event.

Daniel Chase photo via Wikimedia. Before Hurricane Sandy

But food delivery isn’t the only facet of the food system that requires petroleum. Tractors and other farm machinery, tractor tires, insecticides, fertilizers...all require petroleum. Indeed, it was the industrial revolution and petroleum products as applied to farming that resulted in crop yields that caused the world population to explode from 500 million to over 7 billion in just a couple hundred years.

We need to pause from time to time and think about that. 500 million people is probably the carrying capacity of the earth absent petroleum. That is, this lovely, diverse, rare planet can support/feed only a half a billion homo sapiens. So when oil is gone, there will be at least 7 billion extra starving people (probably 15 billion or more by the time it happens, though drought or disease may have killed several billion first because we have other potential problems that stem from overpopulation).

So imagine: Fertile land and deer and fish for half a billion, with 15 billion clamoring for food. You can see what’s going to happen. People are going to starve to death...but a few will not do it quietly and politely, darn them. They will kill you to get your food, and if your food is gone, some will kill you to use you as food.

I'm working toward food self-sufficiency myself, and if a lot of people do this--including urban gardeners, who can use abandoned lots, roof gardens, median strips, and much more--that will mitigate the problem. Kudos to those who are doing just that. But of course, sufficient people will not do the work, and certain arid places (Phoenix, Las Vegas) are not in climates where that much food can be grown, and we'll end up in a bad situation at some future point.

I don't think I'll live to see it, honestly, but if I had grandkids, I would be working to teach them how to grow their own food and fish--that's for sure.

A foreign war triggers the end of oil in your books. But don’t Iran and Saudi Arabia get along really well?

Not according to what I read. I read several foreign policy papers (rather boring research for me, I confess), and of all the local neighbors who might attack Saudi Arabia for its oil in the future, Iran seemed the most likely. Again, I can’t guess at a date, but one day, surely current tensions will come to that. Its impact on oil exports? That I would not begin to try and predict in the real world. Worst case scenario for the reader more than likely, is Russia backing Iran (as they likely would) and winning and gaining control over the Saudi Arabian oil fields. The British/US invasion of Iraq was ill-considered and wasteful and got us almost no oil. Our entering this hypothetical Iran-Saudi war, if Russia is a major player, to protect our access to Saudi oil? Absolutely necessary. It’ll probably be couched in some typical lie to appease the masses--WMDs or religion or “evil” leaders or whatever--but it will be entirely about oil and, if we want to keep living as we do, if we want to keep eating, not so much a choice as an imperative.

However, much more of the US's oil comes from Canada than from the Middle East at this point, so in our real world, this wouldn't be so much of a crisis.

more next week

Repost: Oil Apocalypse Blogs #1

As I begin to blog about the topics that I’ve researched and that led me to situate this novel series at the end of petroleum, I hardly know where to begin.It was a three-year research process to come to the series, and some of my reading goes back to my university undergrad days.

I’ll start the series with answering general questions friends and readers have already asked me and imaginary questions that other people might ask in the future.

Do you believe that oil is coming to an end?

Without a doubt.

It’s a finite resource. The world population increases daily by almost a quarter of a million people, India and China, the most populous nations, become bigger users of fossil fuels every day, and it takes tens of millions of years for new oil to be made via geological processes. So yes, absolutely, it’s coming to an end. I don’t need to “believe” it, no more than I need to “believe” in gravity or molybdenum or the planet Mercury. Oil will run out.

But I’ve read in the newspaper there is plenty. Don’t you believe the official measures of available oil and predictions of how long it will last?

Not for a second. These figures come from the oil industry itself (remember, the folks you brought you Deep Horizon and the Exxon Valdez?), which is fixated on short-term profit, not the long-term health of civilization, and from the same governments who have lied about far too much for my entire life. Obviously none is to be trusted and all have their own vested economic interests that make lying advantageous to them. They aren’t wholly on my side and have plenty of incentive to lie, so I don’t believe them.

So who do you believe?

Sorry, but I have no one reliable to offer you in exchange for those unreliable sources. I’ve read every peak oil/post oil book there is out there, watched all the documentaries, read hundreds of blog posts by everyone from social scientists to actuaries to economists to “recovering oil executives,” to the Grand Archdruid, to back-to-the-earth small organic farmers who use horses and hoes instead of tractors, and there is so much panic-mongering and so many unlikely claims, so many crazy cults that don’t allow dissent or questions if you wish to clarify the source of their claims, it’s hard to know whom to believe. So I don’t believe any of them either. (lol.)

Sure, that’s because some are clearly nutty, but also because the most rational and well-read of them are predicting details about a future that is unpredictable. I don’t know the future, and they don’t know. Some (not much) new oil could be discovered. New technologies might emerge to get oil out of tar sands more efficiently, though for now it takes more energy to extract it than it gives in return. (same is true of corn-based ethanol.) Nobody knows the shape of the future, and while someone out there (probably a few gas executives and intelligence agencies) is certain how much gasoline is truly left to be pumped up, they aren’t sharing that info.

We do all know this: oil is a finite resource and more than half that ever was has already been burned.

Wikimedia. Oil production and use. Hubbert's Peak in action to 2003

When will oil entirely run out?

Not a clue. After I’m dead and gone, no doubt, and probably before 100 years beyond that has passed, but other than that, without someone first telling us the truth about how much there is, I would not hazard a guess. (Okay, I did hazard a guess in writing this novel series, but Slashed is set about a generation from now, and that seems far too soon for us living in the real, non-fictional world. I didn’t want the world unrecognizable, so I chose that time frame and a world political arrangement that had the US dependent on one foreign source that gets shut off in an instant. Artistic license.)

more to come next week

Repost: some of what I read as research for the Oil Apocalypse series

1) Anything I could find on small ground-unit tactics, including parts of the US Army field manuals and after-action reports from Australian, US, and British ground troops going back to the 1950s. In a few cases, the reports had a few lines about what it felt like to be there and vivid descriptions that helped me imagine (though I’ve never been in combat myself) what that might be like. Many thanks to those authors.

2) I admit that I’m no expert on weapons (I’ve fired a half-dozen, but that’s about it), so online manuals and discussions have helped me appear (I hope) something other than a fool on the topic. Friends help, and I’ll continue to use my friends for just that purpose as I write the rest of the series. A big thank you goes out to them for this help.

3) Though it’s a subtle part of the setting at first, there is a warming trend in the deserts of the southwest US right now and I’ve extrapolated worse in the near future setting of my novels so that the snow level is higher, the mid-altitudes hotter, and the animal populations are shifting. I’ve read paleoclimatology edited for the non-professional reader, including The West Without Water, Ingram and Malamud-Roan. I’ve read climate change books that focus specifically on Arizona and New Mexico, including the beautifully written A Great Aridness by William DeBuys. I revisited some of the ruins of Sinagua and Hohokam people in Arizona where drought and heat drove them away from their home (and which also drove other cultural changes that led to the abandonment of many Indian cities in the 1400s in the southwestern US.) Brian Fagan’s books on water and climate and the history of human civilization provided some additional help. As the series progresses, it becomes more of a cli-fi series.

4) Over the past three years, I’ve read probably everything written for the general audience on peak oil since 1990, including many blogs and debates in comments, ones from the wackdoodle (and the topic seems to attract some of that!) to the sober. I’ve interviewed a petroleum engineer, viewed every documentary movie on the topic I could find, and if I’ve missed a single popular book, I’d be shocked. (Thanks to the public library and the concept of free inter-library loans for much of this.) For a quick overview, I might suggest (though it is not without its problems) the film A Crude Awakening.

5) Wikipedia has become a sine qua non for most authors. I probably look at some page there five times a day. WokFI is just one page I looked at one day (for a scene that lasts barely 25 words), but hardly an hour passes that I don’t look up something like that. I remember the days when you had to drive to the library and look in books and Periodical Indexes and ask reference librarians (who are terrific people) and call around to find friends of friends of friends in order to find such facts. I donate every year (often twice!) to Wikimedia Foundation because they save me a lot of time and effort.

People tell me I spend too much time and effort on research, but as a reader of novels, I like to think the author is telling me truth about the real world rather than nonsense, and so to me it's a worthwhile use of my time. Besides, I like learning, so it's no chore.

Oil Apocalypse 4: Parched

Oil Apocalypse 4 is up on preorder at Amazon. The release date is March 22!

AMAZON US LINK HERE

It will be on Kindle Unlimited, as is the whole series again.

Thank you so much for reading!

Almost done with Oil Apocalypse #4

I wanted to update you on what I'm up to these days. I'm proofreading Oil Apocalypse #4, Parched, and I'll turn it over to the pro proofreader on March 1. I think I should be able to get it out around March 20 with a three-week pre-order period.

I'm not 100% sure where to go from there in the tale. I had outlined a book 5, but it was going to be a terribly bleak story, and I'm not in the mood to do that at this moment. (It gets harder to kill characters the longer I live with them!) So now I'm dithering. (You can stop at book 3, or you can stop at book 4, and it should feel like a complete series, no matter what I end up saying in book 5.)

I have a related series planned for longer after the end of oil, hundreds of years later, with a distant descendant of Sierra in the lead role. Have you ever seen the TV shows about Life After Humans? (there are two or three.) This fascinates me, how humans might be rebuilding while around them, there is rusting steel from collapsed bridges, crumbled skyscrapers, and other old tech that still exists, doesn't work, and creates something of a puzzle for the survivors. I've done quite a bit of reading about simple tech--building a wooden windmill to grind grain, blacksmithing, and so on. I plan to write that three-book series in 2019...unless some new, shiny idea jumps up, raises its hand, and demands to be noticed.

Ideas, by the way, are never my problem. I have files stuffed with ideas for novels, stories, and probably a dozen first chapters that wouldn't make half-bad books were I to continue them. I woke up a month ago with two great ideas for books I'll probably never have time to write. I'm an idea factory! The difficulty is in choosing between them, finding something I believe my fans will like but that won't bore me by being too similar to what I've already written.

In personal news, I'm moving halfway across the country in March, with the dates not yet set in stone (partly because of weather). What this means is that I might not be able to blog every single Sunday in March and April, but I'll get some articles up on some Sundays.

For those of you looking forward to spring, enjoy the weather, and for those of you entering autumn soon, enjoy the end of the awful heat you probably have had. 

Apologies. Too busy to write an article

While my blog is, most Sundays, a researched non-fiction article, this week, I'm too busy to write another. My apologies. The good news is, I'm putting the finishing touches on Oil Apocalypse 3. I have only to proofread it and, depending on when my cover artist is free, it should be up for pre-order in mid to late November. Oil Apocalypse 2 is up for pre-order now. So I'm well ahead of my original schedule, and you'll have a complete story in hand by the end of the year.

However, the series won't be entirely done at that point. While books 1-2-3 will complete a tale, I'll return to the neighborhood nine years later (in their time) to take up the story again in a book 4 with whoever has survived the first nine years of the end of oil. New problems, new enemies, and new opportunities will abound. I hope to complete the rest of the series over the course of 2018.

Oil Apocalypse 2: Bleeding is on pre-order

Bleeding, the second installment in the Oil Apocalypse series is available at Amazon now for pre-order.

HERE.

I'm working hard on Book 3, and it should be out in November.

Electricity: we have some problems

I want to talk today about electricity.

It isn’t a big part of my Oil Apocalypse novel series yet. But it will be in book #4.

In the U.S. and Canada, we’re close to being in big trouble with electricity. We’ve relied on it our entire lives. It has always been there with the flick of a switch, as much of it as we want, whenever we want it. Less and less is that likely to be so in the future.

Right now, fossil fuels produce most of the U.S. electricity, with nuclear and renewables of all sorts producing about 20% each. Fossil fuels will run out. Also, they are horrible for our health in the short and long term, burning them drives climate change, and yet we’re stuck with them for now.

Our entire electrical infrastructure is based on them, and nukes work pretty well with that system. As we move to renewables, this old system becomes a problem. The short explanation is this: electricity is quite hard to store. Nuclear power and fossil fuel power cannot be ramped up or shut off quickly. Those plants were designed to run all the time. Wind and solar (which by the way are not as eco-friendly as we might hope) can--and do--start up and shut off in seconds. The problem is with the shutting off.  The wind quits blowing. Clouds roll in. No electricity! But if the coal plants are all shut off when that happens, or the nuclear plant is at rest, you can’t exactly turn them on like a light switch. It can take hours or days to make those plants start generating electricity again.

So imagine a future in which we rely 100% on renewable electricity. The wind quits blowing and the sun goes down, both at the same time. Oops.

Choice A: live without electricity until the wind blows again or the sun shines again, or until another form can be generated or transported across a long distance. (As someone who lives in a hot desert right now, I can promise you, this is not really an option on 120-degree days!) Or choice B: find a way to store it in massive amounts so there is electricity saved up for times when sun or wind or water isn’t generating it.

Storage of electricity is a big challenge. Batteries go bad. Big batteries--enough to run a whole city during the peak evening hours--aren’t part of our infrastructure. There are other ways to store electricity, like using excess when you have it to pump a whole lot of water up really high, and then letting the water fall in a controlled manner, via gravity, to spin turbines when you need it, but is there such a device in your neighborhood? I’m guessing not. So we need to build these sorts of storage devices. Or invent new ways to store it. We’re not nearly there yet. Indeed, we’ve barely begun.

Worse, if you are on wind, and the wind starts to blow hard, there can be too much electricity and that can burn out transformers, fry lines, and otherwise result in damage to the grid so there is no electricity at all. Right now, you could ask a wind farm to shut off their delivery to the grid at such times, but they won’t. Why? Because that’s how they get paid, by delivering electricity. As we switch to more renewables but don’t update the delivery system--the wires and so on--expect more outages from this sort of event.

You like solar better? Here’s a chart I whipped up that compares electricity generated to electricity used by a typical family on a weekday. You can see the problem at a glance. You need some way to store it (my characters use batteries, as I have myself in the past) if you want to do anything after sunset that requires power.

There’s a lifestyle solution to this, which I lived for many, many years. You do a lot of electrical things from 10-2, when the sun is highest, including charging your computer, portable DVD player, phone, and Kindle. You run your fan all you want during those hours. You use your vacuum cleaner. But then at 2:00, you start to live a different lifestyle. You conserve. When the sun falls, you use up all the charge in one device, then in the next, then in the next to entertain yourself, and if you run them all down, you don’t get to used them again until 10 a.m. the next day. You rise with the sun and sleep soon after dark. Prime-time TV is the enemy of this lifestyle. You turn on only one low-voltage LED light. This works pretty well in spring and fall and in summers in temperate locations. Forget about heating in winter if it’s cold because in the dead of night, that's when you’re down to very little stored electricity indeed. You pile on another blanket and slip on another pair of socks. You use a hot water bottle to be warm enough to get to sleep. And, like me, you eat a baked potato for breakfast every morning because the oven working for 45 minutes helps take the chill off the kitchen.

I think I’m a rare person who is willing to live like this forever, having first experienced unlimited electricity at my command. And even I’m only willing to live like that forever if I can inhabit a temperate place! Unfortunately, not everyone in the USA can fit into coastal California, where you could live like that indefinitely. (In my case, I moved twice a year, using elevation control as my substitute for heat/air conditioning. Up high in the mountains in summer, it was pleasant in the days. Down in the low desert in winters, it was warm enough at night to need no heat. And by warm enough, I mean it was around freezing on the worst nights. Again, not a choice many people would embrace. But you do get used to that.)

Back to problems with the grid. Because of deregulation in the late 80’s, trees don’t get trimmed as often today, and trees growing into lines can bring the electrical grid down for millions of people. So can ice storms. So can a computer glitch or an inattentive employee at the power company. We live right now with a cobbled-together system that is aging, that isn't meant for renewable generation, and is really something of a mess.

Collectively, we are in deep trouble. Right now, right here, in the world we inhabit, our electricity delivery system is like that old car you kept running despite the hole in the floorboard and the non-functioning heater when you were 22 and poor. It’s a wonder it got you anywhere at all.

As for my characters in my novel series Oil Apocalypse? They were smart. They didn’t trust the aging grid, so they stayed off it when they built their homes. They generated their own electricity. One family had both solar and wind, so if the sun wasn’t shining, the wind might still be blowing. Thus, they could afford to have a smaller battery bank. The other families with only one form of power generation had lots of batteries.

And, spoiler alert, here comes a new problem. Batteries, unfortunately, don’t last forever. At some point after batteries are no longer manufactured in my fictional world, and the batteries hold very little charge, these off-the-grid systems will only be useful during sunny days (for the solar powered home) or windy moments (for the wind powered home). Extremes of weather will have to be dealt with the way people always have and still do in poor countries: Bundle up when it’s cold, and don’t work hard and live in the shade when it’s hot.

If you thought this is going to be a problem in the future, you would probably own some labor-saving devices that weren’t electrical. I can barely remember helping my grandmother run a hand-crank wringer-washer. This is far easier than banging your clothes on a rock, and all it requires is human power, the turning of a simple crank several times. Even at age 5, I could turn the crank.

you needn't dress like this to use it

One power-saving device I loved in my solar-only lifestyle was this, a solar shower. Basically, a black plastic bag (I’ve tried several brands, and this is definitely the good one), it allows you to take a shower or to do your dishes with a minimal wait period and passive solar heating of the water. Passive-solar water heaters are another useful item for the post-apocalyptic survivor to own, and I’ve given both of these to my characters in Oil Apocalypse.

The toughest challenge with electricity and for living a lifestyle with little or none is food preservation. That’s going to be a serious problem for my characters in book 4. And if you’ve ever lost electricity for five days because of a storm, you know that, right? It was a problem for you as well. I’ve owned two-way refrigerators that can run on either propane or electricity. But if you don’t have electricity and you don’t have fossil fuels, that isn’t much of a help. So what do you do? Eat meat as soon as you kill it, or smoke it, or salt it. I hope you know of a good salt source nearby.

I’ve rambled, I see, and don’t have the time to un-ramble this blog post. (I’m finishing Oil Apocalypse #3 as I write this.) But I hope I’ve given you more to be afraid of think about.

For more on this topic, I suggest reading The Grid by Gretchen Bakke.

The lure of apocalyptic thinking

The truth is, after all that reading (see prior week's post) about how civilizations collapse (or contract and re-form in another way), I don’t really believe entirely in a quick apocalyptic crash like those I write about. Yes, I feel the draw of that sort of thinking. Who doesn’t? Most of us love exploring this idea, at least in the novels we read and the movies we watch. Some people take it even further and actually prepare for “the end times,” stockpiling food, ammunition, drugs, and gold.

really silly stuff

We are not as logical as we’d like to believe we are. We are not logical in the face of powerful animal emotions and drives that steer us more often than our complex thinking brains do.
Every generation--or quite large chunks of it--has thought it will be the last generation, that civilization is on the brink. That seems to be part and parcel of being a human being. It’s a form of egotism, say the experts, the unconscious belief that we are at the center of everything, that this, our lifetime, is the pivotal moment, that the world has never been going to hell in a handbasket faster and that the end is surely nigh.

And yet, what statistics show us is that the world has never been safer, not in the places most of my readers live. Safer how? From disease, from war, from roaming bands pillaging and raping. Over my lifetime the murder rate in my nation has dropped a lot.

The experts say, the psychology is: if the world is ending in my lifetime, then I’m pretty darned special, aren’t I? But if the world is safer now, if I’m just one of billions of people in a world that will continue without a hiccup when I die of some ignoble old-age disease, the same as tens of billions who came before me and billions more who will come after...then who am I? Sort of nobody. This kind of knowledge can set off an existential crisis.

This meshes with my experience and the cynical, skeptical view I've gained. I’ve lived through Y2K (the computers will all be so confused we won’t be able to eat, eeek! It’s the END), 2012, and Hale-Bopp hysteria and much more. I’m even old enough to have done the “duck and cover” drills for nuclear war (which, to be fair, seems remotely possible--I’ll allow you nuclear war as a semi-rational fear). When I was a kid and went somewhere like summer camp or a weekend rock music festival, and I met kids from other places, I realized everyone thought their own small town, no matter how truly inconsequential, would be high on the Russian’s list of targets for nuclear strikes. Sorry, people from (for example) Bloomington Indiana or Marion Illinois, but you were never ever on that list.

Even as a teenager, I saw that believing you were on that list elevated your sense of your own importance. If we were all right about being in the top 10 targets list in our goofy little Midwestern towns, then the Russians wouldn’t have had any bombs left for Washington DC or New York or bomber factories or missile silos. Surely they weren’t that stupid!

Most people who were rabid about Y2K or 2012 now would deny ever believing in it...much the way if you once got drunk at a wedding and made a fool of yourself, you push that out of your mind and might eventually come to deny that. (Perhaps we all need a wife to remind us of these moments. “Oh yes you did say that!” lol)

When we talk about the “collapse” of civilizations, or when scientists do, I often think we should use a different world. Collapse implies catastrophe. But when civilizations fall, they generally do something closer to “contract” (in drought-stricken deserts, as with the Anasazi, the people simply move, to literally greener pastures). Imperial Rome fell. It collapsed! We all know that. But, hey, you know, Rome is still there. You can go visit it, even! It’s in a place called Italy, and some of the people who live there are direct descendants of imperial Romans of 2000 years ago and even some of their buildings are still there. When Italy collapses as a nation--and it will, as all nations will--there will probably still be a Rome. It’s a good site to build a city, so it’ll probably still be a town after oil is long gone or after a pandemic hits or after climate change makes where I live uninhabitable.

If you’re interested in the psychology of end-time thinking, this article is interesting (written just after the world did not end in 2012): apocalypse psychology. A trip to google would get you a number more.

I’m not saying everything is hunky-dory and always will be. Read the last two month’s blog posts, and you’ll see how pessimistic I am. Oil will end. Potable water is going to be a real issue one day. The salinization of California's soil is likely going to create a worldwide food crisis before too long. Our electrical infrastructure (which I’ll write about in a future post) in the US and Canada is in bad shape and bizarrely enough, renewable energy sources are stressing it more than ever. So expect blackouts to increase until we get that sorted. And if you’re in a city, expect some rioting and looting during blackouts. Don’t go sightseeing when that happens because looters can be dangerous. Hunker down, conserve resources, don’t suffocate yourself with generator exhaust, and it will pass, the lights and fridge will come back on, the cleaning crews will be out sweeping up the broken glass, and all will be well again.

Even a big collapse, as with climate change or oil depletion, will not happen overnight. Adjustments will be made. People will move from Florida or Arizona, new technologies will ease the slide, and much of life in first world nations will be enjoyable as ever.

Longtime followers of my blog also know I say if you live in Oklahoma, be prepared for a tornado, in Toronto, for a bad ice storm, and in Florida, for a hurricane, in Japan...well, everything but tornadoes. You guys get the disasters in Japan! Those could happen, and while it is statistically unlikely you'd die from a weather event, you could be very uncomfortable for weeks because of it. Lightning is the biggest weather killer, and I'll bet that you have gone outside in a thunderstorm or gotten in the tub or shower. I know I have!

This post is my way of saying, though I am writing a novel series about a catastrophic end of oil scenario, I hope that you know it’s just fiction. Don’t let it push you over the edge into extremist thinking or behavior or for heaven's sake, make yourself sick over it. Look around you. Go for a walk in your own town. See? Everything is fine right now.

If you are worried for your children or grandchildren (even if they are not yet born), and what might happen to them thirty or fifty years down the road, I will talk about a couple of simple solutions to position them best for a contraction of civilization. I might be wrong in my suggestions, but they are largely fun suggestions, so you'll have lost nothing by trying one or two of them.

Oil Apocalypse: the Germ

Not just the germ for the Oil Apocalypse series of novels, but for my thinking about the collapse of civilization, sprouted decades ago, at university. There, I read various Club of Rome publications and Limits to Growth (which is entirely right in general, though people slam it for being wrong in a few specifics). Political science professors introduced to me to some fascinating principles that I absorbed. I didn’t think of this often as a young adult--I was busy getting laid and establishing a career like most people in their 20s--but it was percolating in the back of my mind. I wasn't yet a writer and didn't think people like me could be writers.

If you want to know more about Limits to Growth, an easy way to learn is to read this recent article.

I became interested in the topic of collapse--why and how civilizations fall--long before the Jared Diamond book on it. I should start with the 1988 book Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy, a seminal political science work that focuses largely on military power and how it first builds empires and then contributes to the collapse of them. I took some archeology courses in the 1990s and learned more about ancient civilizations that are naught but ruins now and why they may have ended. The Diamond book Collapse was released, and I read that. He speaks a lot of resource depletion due to overpopulation as a core cause of collapse. I’ve since read Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies, which talks about complexity of systems being the cause of collapse, a sort of weight that accumulates until it breaks a society into smaller, more manageable pieces. I’m currently working my way through mathematician Peter Turchin’s writing on the topic which analyzes the matter in a slightly different way. I suspect none has THE answer, but I suspect each has a piece of an answer to the question “what makes complex societies collapse?”

If you wander over to youtube, you’ll find interviews and lectures by all these men, or you can go read the Wikipedia pages on each of the mentioned books and get this gist.

If you’re not in the mood to read or listen to lectures, the most important thing to know is this: because of various causes, civilizations always collapse. It’s an inescapable rule, just like “you will die” is a rule. Whatever nation-state you inhabit is not immune to ending, as you are not immune to death. Wave your flag harder in response to this statement all you want, but it won’t stop the inevitable collapse. Rome’s empire fell. Alexander the Great conquered a huge swath of land but you’ll notice most of those conquered people don’t speak Greek any longer. Persia fell. The Mongols became something less than Genghis might have hoped. The sun sets pretty quickly on the British Empire nowadays. Collapse happens.

Often, collapse is more like "contraction." Rome fell, but you know, there is still a Rome in Italy, and some of the people there are descended from Imperial Romans.

Here's something to ponder: because we are in part a global society now, quite intertwined, trading goods across vast distances, is it more likely that if, say, the United States collapses will it take Canada, Australia, Britain, Japan, and Saudi Arabia with it? In the not-too-remote past, this was not so. Portugal used to be an empire of great power. When it collapsed from that position and because a much less powerful nation, it was good for the rest of Europe, not bad. It probably would be a real problem if that happened today--and not just because of the EU.

Another interesting question is: what does collapse look like in the modern age? Does it happen boom, overnight? Preppers obviously think so and most post-apocalyptic novels, including mine, cater to that belief/fear/desire. Or does it happen slowly, in a stair-step fashion, and in such a way that only a few people understand that they are living in the midst of a collapse as it occurs?

Part of the problem with how the human mind works is that we want simple answers and we think better when contemplating the short term. Trying to think about the collapse of vast civilizations, including how our own will collapse, takes a disinterested perspective, and a broad view.

While my other post-apocalyptic novels are about a specific triggering event, the Oil Apocalypse series depended on my inventing imaginary answers to these more complicated questions of how and how quickly collapse occurs. There is no way to write an exciting novel while including all of this information I’ve learned. I tried to hint at some of the complexities of the slow collapse leading up to the catastrophic event of the destruction of the Ras Tanura port in book 1 of my series, and I hope I was neither too subtle about that, nor too dull and academic. Spoiler alert: there's a second series planned for a long, long time after this series. That's because I think people will survive collapse, and I make this belief into fictional reality in series 2.

So in books 2-4 of the first series, and in the second series, I’ll let the slow collapse continue....

I have good news about Oil Apocalypse!

Because my imagination and fingers have been working overtime the past six weeks, the third book will be ready much sooner than I'd planned. I still must coordinate with cover artist and proofreader for this surprise change, but if Book 2 drops into your Kindle on October 6, it's quite possible Book 3 will appear in late November, which is fully six weeks earlier than I had originally thought I could do it. Yay for all of us!

And those three books will comprise a sort of sub-series, a complete tale that comes to a resting point. After that, there will be a time gap (for the characters, not for me and you) and we'll come back to them in Book 4 several years later, when relationships, resources, and troubles will have changed.

I originally thought this first section would be one book, but that wasn't so. And then I thought it would be two books, but I got so many interesting ideas, I realized I couldn't fit them into a single volume. So three books it is for this sub-series.

There is every possibility that there will be six or seven books in the series. I know the final scenes of the series as clearly as if I witnessed them happening in real life, and I can tell that they aren't coming up in any book soon. So if you like the Oil Apocalypse series, this is good news indeed. It won't be a short series!

Next Sunday I'll return to my posts on the end of oil, the collapse of civilizations, and related matters.

The Oil Apocalypse Blogs: 4

Don’t you think prepping and having a bunker full of powdered butter and a case of Amoxicillin and seeds and lots of ammunition will save you in case of a total collapse and food riots and all that?

I honestly don’t, sorry. I know it's a big business, prepper products, and that people are passionate about this (and some only pretend to be passionate to make money off the true believers), but I don’t think prepping will work. Again, I really don’t believe that a violent collapse will happen in my or your lifetime, but let’s say against all odds that a SHTF scenario is coming in ten years. I think if you’re anywhere near a city, living in a normal home with a normal number of occupants who go to the shooting range, responsibly, twice a month to keep up their skills, you’ll die quickly if the hungry hordes arrive and see you have a garden and food stores. Maybe if you had a compound with 250 trained soldiers who kept in training daily, in a remote mountain site surrounded by barbed wire, you could make it...but then compounds like that, well off the beaten path, tend to quickly devolve into bizarre paranoid cult dictatorships where the teenage girls don’t fare so well, and that occurs long before the crisis comes (which it probably won’t in the lifetime of any cult out there today, so you're risking a lot for no gain). So personally? I’m not moving to one of those compounds and would suggest you keep your daughters away from them.

Isn’t it possible we’ll figure out a way to use something common as fuel? Like air or salt water?

No, because again of the pesky laws of physics. But let’s say we could magically turn regular old air into fuel--into energy as amazing and cheap as petroleum was in 1930, plus some form of waste product (aka pollution). Fast forward. This could not possibly turn out well. (“Honey, you want to drive the air-car to the store while I suffocate to death, or vice versa?”)  Petroleum was probably our one chance, and ... well ... we kinda blew it. I’m not excepting myself from the blame, nor am I excepting myself from the evolutionary psychology truth about people that drives us to behave like this. We are short-term thinkers, and we weigh present benefits as many times more important than future ones. Our New Year’s resolutions about food and exercise mostly fail because a chocolate bar and resting after work appeal more than the long-term benefit. And we use up a finite gift like petroleum now rather than doling it out at a more responsible rate.

Can’t we colonize the galaxy and find new energy sources?

No. We can’t even begin to repair the damage we’ve done to this planet, much less terraform Mars to be habitable for humans, a place that has zero biomass, no protective magnetosphere, dead soil, and no oil to drill for anyway. Rocket fuel, which is not petroleum-based, nevertheless requires petroleum to manufacture. So that’s how you want to spent the last 2% of it? Going to a planet that can’t possibly support human life? (sigh.) We’ve never found any sign of so much as algae on another planet. Oil may be unique in the galaxy, even if intelligent life is not.

The Oil Apocalypse Blogs: 3

Can solar power, hybrid cars, turbines, biodiesel, and nuclear power save our easy suburban life?

Not a chance. Solar, wind, and even nukes will provide electricity after coal and natural gas run out. And I’ve been reading up on how fragile the US grid for electricity is, and there’s horrible news there too. A lot of expensive infrastructure has to change fast for renewables to provide all our electricity.

But in any case, electricity isn’t food. It isn’t delivery of goods across oceans. Electricity isn’t putting tires on a vehicle that will rush your kid to the hospital in an ambulance (where, without plastics, I have not a clue what kind of equipment the doctors will be using anyway). Electricity is nice, mind you. It lets Siri and Alexa tell you knock-knock jokes, and it helps me write my novels and get them to your device. It keeps people in Yellow Knife from freezing to death and people in Adelaide from dying of heat stroke. I like electricity a good deal, though I’ve lived without hardly any myself over many years (one 85-watt solar panel, two batteries, DC power, and no other electricity served me fine for a decade, though that was in no way a typical suburban lifestyle).

Oil does so much more than drive us around; an astonishing amount of stuff we rely on is petroleum-based. (Glancing around... My eyeglasses, computer, shoes, carpet, electrical cords, Kindle, some clothing, some furniture bits. The driveway surface outside my front door. The tires on my car, and at least half the stuff under its hood that keeps it running. And I didn’t even have to stretch my neck to see all that!)

Renewables alone won’t give us the electricity we (think we) need. One day, I suspect, electricity will have to be coming mostly from nuke plants, many more plants than now exist, built (because oil is required to do that too) before oil runs entirely out. I will jump on the nutcase forecasting bandwagon to say this much. When/if that happens, no matter what assurances there are, expect a Chernobyl or Fukashima every three to five years or so. So, you know, buy property UPwind, not downwind of your local nuke plant. (I’m downwind of one. Do as I say and not as I do!) Um, also? We’re at peak uranium already. So unless the technology of nuclear reactors takes a massive leap forward in a shockingly short time, that phase won’t last long either. Then our descendants might be part of a great human migration away from extreme climates, the locations of which will likely be different than today’s, because while we can live without electricity for most things (as I found out when living without more than one 85-watt solar panel gave me), we can’t survive 130 degree days and 100 degree nights without it, which is where Phoenix is headed, and soon. Whoever is around after oil can live in temperate climes and with little to no electricity. We hominids did that for hundreds of thousands of years; we will again.

Some people will say we humans are great inventors and we’ll invent our way out of the inevitable end of oil. Perhaps, but I don’t believe we will because you cannot invent your way out of the rules of physics and biology, and nothing on the horizon looks able to replace most uses of oil. Minor new technologies will create minor improvements (as when electric car batteries can be manufactured more cheaply or to weigh much less, or when solar panels may one day not require almost as much electricity to manufacture as they’ll put out over their lives, which is the current state of affairs).

Of course and on the other hand...people used to living life one way will resist change. Look up all the brouhaha about smart electric meters. To keep the electrical grid going and to avoid blackouts, in many communities (mine is one of them), they remotely control things like your thermostat temp, no matter what you'd like. This way, everyone has some cooling or heating, and they avoid week-long blackouts that would literally kill people. But people are very against this! So, invent all you like, but you can't invent around greed and a sense of entitlement. (Entitlement to air conditioning? What a bizarre concept.)

I believe the great-great-great-(maybe another great or two)-grandchildren of people now being born may be living something like an 18th century agrarian life again (though surrounded by plastic trash from the petroleum age). Instead of spraying petrochemicals on their crops to increase the yield, they’ll once again spread manure. Yes, manure smells bad, but compared to death by starvation, guiding the manure-spreader around the farm once a year doesn’t sound like a terrible future.

So I’m an optimist about the distant future.

It’s just getting from this point to that point, particularly in how that excess 15 billion humans gets culled, that I’m afraid will be ugly and scary.

The Oil Apocalypse Blogs: 2

What is the scariest aspect of the end of oil?

In my opinion? Food. Our just-in-time food delivery system depends entirely on petroleum. Starving people may not remain pleasant people, especially not when they live in the concentrations of today’s urban centers. England’s little glitch back 10 years ago that resulted in the “nine meals from anarchy” talk gave us a hint of what may well happen at the start of such an event.

Daniel Chase photo via Wikimedia. Before Hurricane Sandy

But food delivery isn’t the only facet of the food system that requires petroleum. Tractors and other farm machinery, tractor tires, insecticides, fertilizers...all require petroleum. Indeed, it was the industrial revolution and petroleum products as applied to farming that resulted in crop yields that caused the world population to explode from 500 million to over 7 billion in just a couple hundred years.

We need to pause from time to time and think about that. 500 million people is probably the carrying capacity of the earth sans oil. That is, this lovely, diverse, rare planet can support/feed only a half a billion homo sapiens. So when oil is gone, there will be at least 7 billion extra starving people (probably 15 billion or more by the time it happens, though drought or disease may have killed several billion first because we have other problems that stem from overpopulation).

So imagine: Fertile land and deer and fish for half a billion, with 15 billion clamoring for food. You can see what’s going to happen. People are going to starve to death...but a few will not do it quietly and politely, darn them. They will kill you to get your food, and if your food is gone, some will kill you to use you as food.

(I’m glad I won’t live to see it.)

Don’t Iran and Saudi Arabia get along really well?

Not according to what I read. I read several policy papers (rather boring research for me, I confess), and of all the local neighbors who might attack Saudi Arabia for its oil in the future, Iran seemed the most likely. Again, I can’t guess at a date, but one day, surely current tensions will come to that. Its impact on oil exports? That I would not begin to try and predict. Worst case scenario for the reader more than likely, is Russia backing Iran (as they likely would) and winning and gaining control over the Saudi Arabian oil fields. The British/US invasion of Iraq was ill-considered and wasteful and got us almost no oil. Our entering this hypothetical Iran-Saudi war, if Russia is a major player, to protect our access to Saudi oil? Absolutely necessary. It’ll probably be couched in some typical lie to appease the masses--WMDs or religion or “evil” leaders or whatever--but it will be entirely about oil and, if we want to keep living as we do, if we want to keep eating, not so much a choice as an imperative.

more next week

The Oil Apocalypse Blogs: 1

As I begin to blog about the topics that I’ve researched and that led me to situate this novel series at the end of petroleum, I hardly know where to begin.

I’ll start with answering general questions friends and readers have already asked me and imaginary questions that other people might ask in the future.

Do you believe that oil is coming to an end?

Without a doubt.

It’s a finite resource. The world population increases daily by almost a quarter of a million people, India and China, the most populous nations, become bigger users of fossil fuels every day, and it takes tens of millions of years for new oil to be made via geological processes. So yes, absolutely, it’s coming to an end. I don’t need to “believe” it, no more than I need to “believe” in gravity or molybdenum or the planet Mercury. Oil will run out.

But I’ve read in the newspaper there is plenty. Don’t you believe the official measures of available oil and predictions of how long it will last?

Not for a second. These figures come from the oil industry itself (remember, the folks you brought you Deep Horizon and the Exxon Valdez?), which is fixated on short-term profit, not the long-term health of civilization, and from the same governments who have lied about everything they can lie about for my entire life. Obviously none is to be trusted and all have their own vested economic interests that make lying advantageous to them. They aren’t wholly on my side and have plenty of incentive to lie, so I don’t believe them.

So who do you believe?

Sorry, but I have no one reliable to offer you in exchange for those liars. I’ve read every peak oil/post oil book there is out there, watched all the documentaries, read hundreds of blog posts by everyone from social scientists to actuaries to economists to “recovering oil executives,” to the Grand Archdruid, to back-to-the-earth small organic farmers who use horses and hoes instead of tractors, and there is so much panic-mongering and so many unlikely claims, so many crazy cults that don’t allow dissent or questions if you wish to clarify the source of their claims, it’s hard to know whom to believe. So I don’t believe any of them either.

Sure, that’s because some are clearly nutty, but also because the most rational and well-read of them are predicting details about a future that is unpredictable. I don’t know the future, and they don’t know. Some (not much) new oil could be discovered. New technologies might emerge to get oil out of tar sands more efficiently. Nobody knows the shape of the future, and while someone out there (probably a few gas executives and intelligence agencies) is certain how much gasoline is truly left, they aren’t sharing that info.

We do all know this: oil is a finite resource and more than half that ever was has already been burned.

Wikimedia. Oil production and use. Hubbert's Peak in action to 2003

When will oil entirely run out?

Not a clue. After I’m dead and gone, no doubt, and probably before 100 years has passed, but other than that, without someone first telling us the truth about how much there is, I would not hazard a guess. (Okay, I did hazard a guess in writing this novel series, but Slashed is set about a generation from now, and that seems far too soon for us living in the real, non-fictional world. I didn’t want the world unrecognizable, so I chose that time frame and a world political arrangement that had the US dependent on one foreign source that gets shut off in an instant. Artistic license.)

more to come next week