When oil is no longer cheap here, won't...

precious metal prices soar? I mean, my guess is that for precious metals, much like oil, the easy stuff (easy to mine) has been found already, leaving only the hard to reach (costly to drill) metals remaining. This would send prices through the roof, right?

nothing will soar.

I don't think oil will directly affect precious metal prices. I do think that indirectly, the increased cost of oil will strain the worlds economies even more and will create problems within the paper money system. The resulting instability and uncertainty will drive up the prices of precious metals. Governments will then find a way to drive the PM prices down in order to avoid wholesale abandonment of the paper money system that they have grown accustomed to using as a means of power and control over 90% of the worlds population. This is all just my opinion though, I'm no economist.

But just go through your house and look at stuff made frm oil.

Plastic -- Oil
Medicine -- Oil
Paint -- Oil
Vinyl Siding-- Oil
Carpet -- Oil
Food -- Oil

You get the picture.
Oh, BTW, your car uses it too.

Fertilizer - Oil
Pesticides - Oil
Herbicides - Oil
Diesel for irrigation systems/pumps - Oil

It's going to be a lot more basic than higher-priced plastic crap at Stuff-Mart.

But everything from asphalt to aspirin uses it.
I for one am *terrified* that OPEC just declared that
they will keep oil pegged to the dollar.

I don't think Europe will stand for it, because it will punish them
unfairly.

www.theinternationalforecaster.com is a good read for info on the global markets and the dollars collapse. Bob Chapman is predicting $50 silver $1500 gold.

If it's not produced locally, soaring transportation costs will price some goods out of the reach of many.

Of all the bioregions in North America, which ones are capable of supporting their human populations without oil?

I'm having trouble thinking of even one. Before petroleum, cities didn't grow much beyond a few hundred thousand people.

What about worldwide? How many bioregions on Earth are capable of supporting their human populations without petroleum?

It's lookin' to be pretty ugly over the next 30 years...

I look at my three-year old and think, what the hell is he going to see?

A year and a half ago, during the massive power outage, Toronto's reservoir was diminished to less than a day's worth of fresh water. Who had considered the fact that, without power, the water couldn't be pumped? That, to me, was a teaser for Peak Oil's early crunch.

We live so close to the edge, unconsciously.

And it's alarmingly clear that we could not stay in our home for more than a few days during the winter if the natural gas stopped flowing into our house. We'd certainly have no running water after the first day or two without heat. And that precious natural gas comes in a pipeline that might start all the way up by you in Canada. Seems very perilous.

We've started stocking up on even more emergency supplies than usual lately. Wool blankets, canned food, water bottles, etc... I want to make sure we can survive 'off the grid' for long enough to figure out what our next step will be should the 'grid' stop functioning.

Personally, I'm inclined to stay here. My city, Madison, can be very community oriented, and if things really go sour, I have hopes we'll pull together and help each other. At this point, it looks like a better idea than going to 'live out in the woods' with no community around.

They are inexpensive and an efficient way to heat your home. You can even construct one yourself at very little cost. They heat air from the sun and circulate the warm air into your home. The system will pay for itself in months to a few years depending on your climate. That will heat your home on sunny days at least. In addition I would look at installing a wood stove. Together with an air heater you can survive even the worst winter days, albeit sometimes not as comfortably as with gas heat.

Passive solar air heaters, many years ago.

That has occurred to me. I have really lousy sunlight in my place -- we're sandwiched in between other houses -- so while they would help with the chill in the air, they wouldn't be enough to keep the pipes from freezing in the basement. If I put them all over the roof, there'd be a better chance, but then I'd need ducts, etc. I'm looking for something I can rely on fairly quickly.

It's not so much ourselves I'm worried about keeping warm -- we can bundle up for a while -- it's the plumbing and such. Then again, there might not be running water for long in a catastropic situation like that, so it might not matter.

I just bought some of the thermal heat exchange curtains for our sunny wndows. They work great. Unfortunately for you, sun is a necessity for them to work.

No amount of insulation will save your pipes on a terrible Wisconsin winter day without some source of heat.

Please tell me how you built the heat exhangers.

Glass sheet in front, small air gap, corrugated sheet metal collector painted flat black behind the air gap.

Put it all in a wooden box, cut slots at the top and the bottom in the back.

Pack rest of box with insulating material if desired, taking care to not obstruct the airflow.

Set up reasonably vertically in the sunlight, and you can feel the warm air coming out of the top within a few moments.

I think I was about 14 when I built it at an alternative energy workshop (Oh, those rockin' 1970's!).

we have lots of hydro power, solar & wind if you include the east slope of the cascades, and with restored ecosystems, should be able to support the population with sustainable farming, hunting, and gathering.

and no, you can't move here.

stealing alternative energy technologies.

And take over their solar and wind energy supplies.... Then comes Iceland and its geothermic sites.

peak oil will be the immediate catastrophe everyone predicts. I think it will ultimately lead us to make some really bad decsisions that could doom the world. Historically societies have made bad decisions that doom the society b/c the alternative threatens the culture and socio-economic system as they know it. A great example of this is the plaster industry in ancient Mesopotamia. The combination of goat herding and the demands of the plaster industry ultimately resulted in the desrtification of much of the Middle East. At numerous points in their history the people of the region where given choices that could preserve their land, but at the expense of the plasetr industry. Unfortunately, they chose the path that continued to support the industry they had relied on for so long.

Similarly, I think the shortage of oil suplies will lead to bad decisions that could be the undoing of the economy and the culture as we know it. We are already seeing this in Oil War I and Oil War II. There will be more Oil Wars in our future. We will also move to more reliance on Unclean Coal and nuclear power to provide our energy. The results may be devetsating, but will only be apparent years after the oil has run out.

The dollar wil crash long before then and gold will already be priced very high. When the world truly goes to hell all that will matter is who can still produce food to live.

I don't know if our liberal ideals will keep us alive at that point. How can we care for our fellow man when doing so will mean starvation?