Book Review: Confronting Collapse
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Cover of Confronting Collapse Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World by Michael C. Ruppert.
We hardly talk about collapse here. Wise Bread is all about living large, while collapse mitigation is usually about living small. But that doesn't mean that there aren't things we can learn from books about collapse.
I'm kind of a connoisseur of books on collapse. I've been reading them since the 1960s (when they were mostly about overpopulation) and read a lot in the early 1980s (when they were mostly about financial collapse due to government debt and inflation). The most important thing I've learned is that many systems — biological, environmental, social, political, economic — are more resilient than people have any right to expect.
Ruppert's new book largely focuses on the threat of peak oil. It effectively makes the point that energy drives everything in the economy: When energy gets expensive, so does everything else (in particular, food and water). It does a workman like job of dismissing the fantasy sources of additional energy (tar sands, clean coal, fusion). More important, it gets it just about right on the non-fantasy sources (wind, solar): They're real and important, but they're no substitute for cheap oil.
The book is structured in the form of a program statement such as might be prepared for a U.S. president by his policy wonks. After laying out its case for collapse, it presents a 25-point program for mitigating collapse. Those are largely exactly right: re-localize the economy (especially food and energy production), remove subsidies from energy boondoggles, shift infrastructure money from road and air projects to rail (oddly, he doesn't mention canals), support community-level efforts at the national level.
The downside of the structure is that, although there is guidance for ordinary people, you have to read between the lines to find it. Re-localizing is something that's going to be done person-by-person and community-by-community anyway. Home-scale solar and wind energy production is possible and quite reasonable, even if it isn't economic without the feed-in tariffs he proposes. A lot of the infrastructure decisions (on roads and the power grid) are going to be made at the local level, where two or three active concerned voters can have as much influence as the President of the United States.
So, why should a Wise Bread reader have any interest in collapse, when so many books on collapse are all about living small (and the ones that aren't are all too often bizarre fantasies of post-apocalyptic violence)? Well, I read them because the good ones turn out to have a lot of overlap with my own personal vision of living large — living large through freedom, rather than living large through mass consumption funded by wage and debt slavery. Making your household and your community centers of production rather than centers of consumption enables living large in a way that lasts. The fact that the same lifestyle mitigates collapse is just a bonus.
It's worth comparing this book to Dmitry Orlov's Reinventing Collapse that I reviewed for Wise Bread a couple years ago. Ruppert's book has none of Orlov's humor and little of Orlov's practical, household-level advice. What it does have is a lot of background information on oil production and depletion, petroleum inputs to food production, alternative energy sources, and so on. If you want to laugh at your problems, go with Orlov. If you want to try to do something about them at the national or global level, go with Ruppert. If you want to do something about them at the household and community level, read both.
Although I regret its lack of practical suggestions for ordinary people, leaving those out has let him steer clear of a lot of survivalist cliches. (And it is the survivalist cliches that turn so many collapse books into a sort of anti-Wise Bread — tracts on living small.) Confronting Collapse does a good job of laying out the case for peak oil and suggesting policies for dealing with it. It's especially good if you want to take action to help everybody, rather than just taking action to help yourself and your neighbors.
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We're all in big trouble!!!
I'm no gun-toting right-wing kook, but the prospects of what's going to happen as our economy lurches through the ups and downs of peak oil (and our lack of preparedness) is downright terrifying. If Obama came out and said so ("we're all $cr@wed ... here's our Manhattan project style plan to deal with it...") it would be less disturbing, but the problem is that the government walks on eggshells to not tick off special interests and many are in denial about it.
The way to deal with it is all the same ... pay down your debt, save money in an investment vehicle that isn't likely to disappear (like many stocks) or depreciate due to inflation, cut your expenses, insulate the heck out of your home, buy as fuel efficient a car as you can afford, gradually upgrade your appliances and electronics to low energy ones that can run off a low power current such as wind or solar, and take a little lesson from our Mormon friends and build up as big as an emergency food and supplies pantry as you can possibly afford.
Gee ... this sounds a lot like what Wise Bread already preaches!
Yes, that's rather the point of reviewing it here on Wise Bread.
Having said that, I'd like to offer a counter point on stockpiling. There are a lot of good reasons to stockpile—not only does it prepare you for minor emergencies (like a flood or a blizzard), save money (if you stock up when you can get a good price), and make your household run more smoothly (because you more often just have what you need without having to make a run to the store to get it), it also offers huge tax-free investment returns--but collapse mitigation isn't one of them. (If your collapse-mitigation strategy involves stockpiling anything, I think you're on the wrong track.)
But all the rest of that stuff—avoiding debt, minimizing energy needs, and making your household a center of production—works well in good times and bad.
Dealing with collapse takes a lot of disposition for certain needs of relative responsibilities that are essential in taking care of proper deliverance of good structures in order to create a stabilized function.