Peak Oil: Life After the Oil Crash

Overview From the Publisher:

No home is complete without this essential resource. M.I.T. graduate Matthew Stein spent 15 years compiling the information for When Technology Fails. This easy-to-use manual is designed for self-reliant living in today's changing world.

As we begin the 21st Century, the rapidly expanding world population is quickly depleting the available natural resources and fossil fuel supply while increasing the demand for basic human needs-food, shelter, clothing and energy. This combined with the current worldwide infrastructure dependent on instant global communication and next-day distribution grids means that any disruption of the norm due to technology breakdowns, weather patterns, solar spots, techno-terrorism or natural upheavals can create massive disruptions to daily life.

When Technology Fails is the first book to offer basic instructions and recommended resources for the wide range of skills and technologies necessary for self-reliant living, achieving mastery of all kinds of emergency conditions, and treading lighter on Mother Earth. When Technology Fails is a user-friendly manual for the 2lst Century in the tradition of the Whole Earth Catalog.

We hope you enjoy reading this important book and can recommend it to your readers.

Foreword by Richard Heinberg:

Technology will fail. You can count on it.

We humans have been making tools for tens of thousands of years. For a similarly long stretch of time we’ve been talking to ourselves and to one another, developing the other strategy that has made us so formidable as a species—languagemaking. Language helped us refine and expand our toolmaking and tool use (imagine trying to produce something as simple as a stone knife if you couldn’t benefit from anyone else’s experience); meanwhile, we invented a range of tools to increase our ability to communicate (writing, printing, the telephone, radio, television, computer networks, and so on). These two strategies—toolmaking and languagemaking—have together made us the most successful large-bodied animal species in planetary history.

Energy always set the rules of the game. All animals obtain their basic biological energy through food (second-hand sunlight), and exert energy through muscles to get what they want and need. Tools helped us leverage muscle energy, and language gave us social power by enabling us to cooperatively strategize, and to diffuse our ideas over distance and time. Both enabled us to appropriate more and more biosphere functions for our own purposes. But always we remained subject to the net energy principle: it takes energy to get energy, and the net marginal profit (from hunting or gardening or farming) was limited and variable, even with the help of bows and arrows, horse collars, and plows.

During the past two centuries, fossil fuels made net energy effectively irrelevant. Suddenly we had access to energy sources produced over geologic time that we could draw down at arbitrarily high rates. The energy required to explore and drill for oil was trivial compared to the energy we could get from burning the stuff. With cheap, high-quality, concentrated fossil energy sources, we could make far more tools than ever before, including mobile ones that carried their energy supply with them. We could make tool networks. We could mechanize production processes. We could free nearly everyone from food-producing routines for other occupations—as factory workers, managers, salespeople, accountants, computer programmers, or advertising artists.

As a result we now live in what French philosopher Jacques Ellul famously called the "technological society"—though he might equally have called it the "fossil-fuel society." It is a pattern of living so suffused with, and linked by, powered tool and information systems that we have become overwhelming as a species (we’ve taken over about 40 percent of the biological productivity of the planet), but utterly vulnerable as individuals. All that’s necessary to cripple us is for the electricity to go out for a few days.

Indeed, the entire system has failure built into it. It is based on the ever-increasing consumption of depleting, non-renewable energy resources. As we consume the cheapest, most easily accessed of those resources and are forced down the net-energy ladder, the technological systems on which we have come to depend will inevitably shudder and give way.

That’s what I mean when I say technology will fail.

But don’t take my word for it. A recent issue of New Scientist (April 5, 2008) explored the emerging study of how and why complex societies tend to collapse, leading with an article titled, "Why the Demise of Civilization May Be Inevitable."

Many people think of modern technology as if it were a magical, autonomous entity capable of overcoming our ancient net-energy constraints. In reality, modern technology has merely increased our exposure to collapse. We should stop assuming that just because we’re smarter than the ancient Romans and Mayans, we can’t be brought down by analogous system failures.

Once we begin to come to terms with all of this, what should we do?

Start by identifying tools that are not dependent on the systems most likely to fail. In other words, find tools you can rely on that don’t require fossil fuels or an operating electricity grid system.

Re-learn the skills that enabled our ancestors to thrive without fossil fuels. Get in touch with others who are similarly interested in surviving collapse, and work with them to create community resilience.

Not all of the tools and skills that are likely to be helpful to us are ancient. A good solar cooker, for example, can enable us to heat food cheaply and conveniently without natural gas or electricity—and the solar cookers available today are far more effective than anything that might have been used by tribal peoples in ages past. In other instances, though, we are likely to find ourselves treading well-worn paths, developing ever more respect for how people in traditional societies intelligently solved life’s persistent problems.

For the most part, simpler technologies are likely to be less environmentally ruinous than the high-powered tool systems on which we have come to rely. Thus any effort we make to return to more reliable and resilient tools will also constitute a giant step toward sustainability and environmentally responsible self-sufficiency.

Clearly, information resources will be enormously helpful in our learning (or re-learning) process. That’s where this book comes in.

When I saw the first edition of When Technology Fails in 2000, I was impressed. Here was a comprehensive review of the tools and skills—and the literature—anyone would need in order to get by as technological society hit the skids.

Now, Matthew Stein has updated his classic text, adding a new chapter on proactive actions for making the shift toward sustainability (both personal and global), and updating all the existing chapters with the latest information, including resource guides. The first edition was written before 9/11, when the term "peak oil" was relatively unknown and "global warming" was still considered a fringe topic. A lot has changed in the world since then.

A single book can’t do everything. There is just too much we need to know. Moreover, many skills need to be learned directly from a teacher (you might be able to learn to operate a fire drill on the basis of diagrams, but for me it took personal interaction with someone who was already good at using one). Nevertheless, When Technology Fails succeeds at just about everything we could realistically hope one book might do to inform us ahead of when technology does falter.

Will technology warn us before it fails? It seems to me that it is doing so now. The price of oil is setting new records almost daily. Electricity grids are straining and buckling in countries around the world. Food prices are skyrocketing and food riots are erupting. All you have to do is turn on your computer and surf the Internet for a few minutes and technology will reveal to you all you need to know about how vulnerable technology is making us.

Get ready. Read this book and follow its suggestions for skills development and further research. Adjust your own oxygen mask before helping others.

Review From Matt Savinar, proprietor of the website "Life After the Oil Crash:"

Like most of my readers, I spent the entirety of my "pre-Peak Oil" life as a fossil-fueled zombie, slavishly servicing the petro-techno, hyper-energetic collective narcosis commonly referred to as "the US economy."

Then I found out about Peak Oil and realized, "Holy Mother of God . . . if this shit's true, I'm like totally screwed. . . and worse yet, I don't even know the first thing to do to begin getting unscrewed."

Then I found Matthew Stein's book, When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance and Planetary Survival. This book which covers pretty much everything you need to know to begin preparing for "life after the oil crash." It has so much valuable information, I am even considering stocking up copies for "investment" or future barter purposes as a book with this much valuable and life-saving information will certainly be more valuable than the US dollar post-peak.

Stein has organized the book into byte-size and manageable skills for you to master and things to acquire. The book is particularly useful to people, who like myself, have spent their entire life in what James Kunstler calls the "hallucinatory economy." We need very simple, clear directions as we begin down the road to reality and self-sufficiency.

For example, right now I'm on Stein's chapter on what you need to include in your "grab and go bag" aka "shit's hit the fan, time to run to the hills bag" aka "grab this bag and haul ass to somewhere remote if Bush lobs a nuke at Iran . . . "

Being a city-slicker by birth and an attorney by trade, I don't know the first thing about what you need to include in your survival pack. If left to my own instincts, I would probably include a three-piece suit, my rolodex and some retainer and fee agreement forms.

Obviously, I wouldn't survive long.

Luckily I have Stein's book (actually four copies - one in my book box, one in my grab-and-go bag, and an extra two just in case something happens to the first two.) So I open to his chapter on survival packs and am able to include the appropriate things. (While I've left out the three-piece suit, briefcase, and rolodex, I just can't give up the retainer and fee agreements. Hey, old habits die hard.)

Stein's book has much more than just information to help you survive short-term emergencies. For instance, he has a chapter on building yourself an small "ecoshelter." When I get to that chapter, I will read through it, do some google searches, purchase or acquire the necessary materials and do my best to construct one myself. Even though I won't be moving out of my apartment and into the shelter anytime soon, having the skill to build one will prove valuable, and possibly profitable, in a post-peak world.

Stein has a section on Peak Oil and is clearly quite well versed in the issues relating to it. There's even a graph from Dr. Campbell in the book!

To read more about Stein and his book visit his website, http://www.whentechfails.com

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