P34k O1l 0008

wspc_P34kO1l_0008

media files:

m4a -> http://media.libsyn.com/media/msb/wspc_P34kO1l_0008.m4a

YouTube ->

Official website -> http://thefuelfilm.com/

---- "Siss Boom Bah!" by: "Mocean Worker featuring Rahsaan Roland Kirk" http://www.moceanworker.com/

Thesis:

Peak Oil isn't just a concept or an idea, though it is that, but peak oil is the harbinger of a change that is coming that is going to sweep everything into a great big pile.

As reality changes to accommodate this new elephant in the room, we're going to have to be creative in the options choices we're all going to make.

Peak oil spells gloom and doom for our way of life, but it does not spell gloom and doom for mankind.

Our dependence on oil is a historic aberration which saw enormous changes coming in, and it will see even more enormous changes going out.

We're not going back to an agrarian society since we have seen the population rise beyond what could be supported by the unaided soil. Either we succeed in this endeavor or we're going to have to play at being "Pol Pot" with world-wide "killing fields". (Pol Pot I'll remind you killed merely in person in five in Cambodia with his agrarian reforms. We'd have to kill four persons in five the world over to achieve a sustainable and supportable population using only the techniques which existed pre-oil, or about a mere century-and-a-half ago.

---- "Shamma Lamma Ding Dong" by: "Mocean Worker featuring Rahsaan Roland Kirk" http://www.moceanworker.com/

Synthesis:

So lets deconstruct peak oil as a series of phenomena which correspond to a modification of Mazlow's pyramid.

Man can live

* Without air: four minutes.
* Without water: four days.
* Without food: four weeks.
* Without sex: Forget it!

Okay, on a less facetious form, lets examine the "real" "Mazlo's" pyramid [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs ].

Basic human needs are:

* physiological,
* safety and security,
* love and belonging,
* esteem and
* self-actualization.


Given the fact that we're knocking every blessed thing into a cocked-hat, lets examine the most basic needs, the physiological:

* Food
* Water
* Breathing
* Excretion
* Sleep
* Homeostasis
* Sex

Back to my facetious pyramid.

"Air" will be pretty much in the same supply it is now.

It might even be cleaner for the same reason that foxes have moved back into Detroit. The base state for a post-industrial society is pretty much the same as for a pre-industrial one. Clean air, plenty of sunshine and lots of "critter space".

You will be relieved to hear that "water" will still flow down hill. Hydroelectric dams will still work. (The lubricants for the turbines "will" require some work.)

You will be relieved to hear that water will still evaporate too. (Of course, clouds "will" form where and when they want to, mostly away from the catch basins of the hydroelectric dams.)

The rest is a bit more problematic.

"Food" production currently demands large areas of land. Unfortunately, that also demands large quantities of oil to accomplish some things:

* farming (for fertilizers, pesticides, moving dirt around harrowing, and harvesting.)
* transportation of produce to market,
* transportation of seed to the farm to begin with,
* maintaining markets (though that is the province of anybody from your local green grocer to a huge box store,)
* moving the produce back to your home.

The problems come primarily from three very disturbing facts:

* First we have to, uh, think different.
* Then we have to overcome the distance between the farm and home.
* Lastly we we have problems of un-cooperative weather, un-cooperative soil, and un-cooperative labor conditions on the farms.

The solutions to these require some attitude adjustment on our part and on the part of the nice folks who build our cities.

---- "Little Bird" by: "Annie Lennox" http://www.annielennox.com/

We got PSAs:

----

Campus Safety urges students, faculty and staff to sign up for text alerts, online @ spc.edu/alerts

This will be used to inform students, faculty and staff in an emergency.

This was useful last year in the bomb scare.

To sign up, students must know their Spirit ID # (Bring their Saint Peter's College ID.)

----

Here's a proper, honest to goodness, real promo. :-)

Promo_WSPC_PeacockNation2008/12/05

----

We've also got some cross promotion going with the web version of St. Peter College's own "Pauw Wow".

The perpetually available and comment capturing web version is "growing on" as opposed to the occasional "Dead Tree" edition which can only capture "a moment in time" for a minority of the news competing for a scarce resource, space with anything else on a fixed number of pages.

As Liebnitz famously once said: "The 'Power of the Press' belongs to those who own one."

But as anyone who can read will attest, the limitations of "that" business model are slowly bleeding to death all of the owners of the "dead tree" press.

The future of the press lies on-line with the internet mixing media according to their appropriateness to whatever is being reported.

From "Twitter" to IM, to e-mail, to FaceBook to Podcasts, to web-radio, to streaming content, to PDFs, to vodcasts, to YouTube, to MP3s, to app mash-ups, to whatever's next, the internet is emerging as the clear winner of the media wars.

So log on to http://pauwwow.com/ and grow with the media.

---- "100% Pure Love" by: "Crystal Waters" http://www.theoneandonlycrystalwaters.com/

Okay back to urban planning.

We've got to refit and insure that all new construction is mixed industrial, agricultural, residential and retail.

Preferably in the same building!

I gave the order because we need that the construction of our "archologies" [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology ] be pretty much be in that order.

We have to stop thinking so "cheap and cheesy", slapdash and jury-rigged, and instead start thinking of habitation as things fitting together and complementing each other.

Now that cheap oil and therefore cheap energy are disappearing from the landscape, the things that depend on cheap oil and therefore cheap energy must disappear also.

I am advocating the creation of arcologies not out of some Utopian visions but because its preferable to the distopian visions that come to the mind's when trying to keep the outside out and the inside hermetically sealed against it.

R. Buckminster Fuller, because he was born and lived some of his life before the era of widespread cheap oil, had designed the principles of a dymaxion arcology out of necessity back when the twentieth century was new.

He was trying to solve the problems of sustainability for his time and now, after the oil enabled diversions of two world wars, countless skirmishes, failed regimes, failed implementations of failed political ideas, countless deaths to serve no purpose, failed religions and false prophets, its time we put down the "Kool-Aid" and started back on the path he'd glimpsed "through a glass darkly" [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_a_Glass_Darkly ] but still more clearly than most of us ever see.

One of the prime principles of his dymaxion philosophy is to extract the maximum benefit for the maximum number of people from the smallest amount of material.

I am not advocating blind acceptance of everything he wrote. The man could have clearly benefitted from some linguistics courses which would have helped him with his need to coin new words.

But the concepts for reforming refitting and creating the new urban arcologies are clearly there.

Imagine living contained in buildings of currently unimaginable size where all of our physical, emotional and spiritual needs can be met, all of our transportation requirements are local.

Imagine living in Dubai ... everywhere.

We'll return to this theme of arcology at several point during upcoming episodes.

---- "Children (Dream Version)" by: "Robert Miles" http://www.robert-miles.com/

Conclusion:

Peak Oil is going to change everything in a wave of innovation or leave us high and dry gasping for breath and grasping at straws stuck in an empty oil barrel.

Its actually going to do both. Some people won't be able to loosen their grasp and will end up holding nothing and burying their children, dead from a millions causes all related to their acceptance of scarcity.

Some people will be able to see that you can only accept things with open hands and will end up owning everything of any value and leave a legacy to a future they can't even imagine.

Some of the innovation that is coming will affect how and where we live and that requires the most open mind of all.

---- "Everybody Loves A Loser" by: "Morcheeba" http://www.morcheeba.co.uk/

Outro

Oh and by the way:

I just want to thank the people who left the nice comments on this blog, sent me email feedback on the podcast of "The Disability Show".

And to my wife who's been chiding me for having thought small all these years, when the need was for exactly this kind of show, "Yes Dear. You were right..."