In the last blog I was speaking about Peak Oil risks, and our ability to prepare for it by finding resilience in growing your own food (and becoming a rebelfarmer!). Today I was pointed to a blogger that calculated the peak oil not as usually by the point of maximum production, but by the point of maximum affordability. His question was: how much barrels of oil can you buy with S&P500, an index of the 500 important industrial stocks? This graph shows that since the 50’s we have experienced two peaks of affordability: before the oil crisis of the 70’s and one, the highest, in 1999. Since 1999 we can buy less and less oil for the same amount of stocks. The blogger argues that it is highly improbable that we will ever reach a higher affordability than in 1999. This would mean that 1999 was our “true” peak oil, as the oil price, corrected for inflation with this methodology, will only continue to go up from this moment on.

Another blogger on (post) peak oil, who is getting famous status at this moment in the USA, Dmitry Orlov, mentioned that peak oil will not be one moment, but a process of acceptance by different population segments with different timings. See here a lecture of him.  
His view is that because a societal collapse is psychologically so hard to accept, people who are able to postpone the consequences of the new reality, will regard people that are already feeling the consequences and are acting according to it, just as “poor people”or “the less fortunate”. Combined with the idea that Peak Oil already happened this is an eye-opener to me. Recently I moved from the Netherlands to France and the economic situation here was quite a shock to me. The welfare state in the Netherlands is quite good developed, not in the least thanks to our gas trade. Here in France, one can simply not survive individually without a job. Consequence: stay with someone else in a house or live on the streets. In fact there are two parameters that have augmented the last decade in a quite scary way in France: the age of youngsters the moment they move out of their parents’ place and the amount of people living on the streets. These people are already living in the post peak reality. No car, or a mini-vehicle that goes max 40 km/h. Shopping at give-away centres, eating over date food from the supermarkets, or gathering food from the markets at closure time. The creative among them are squatting and living from the land in the Massif Central, where a lot of land is barren or are living in mobile homes, and move where the jobs are or where the climate is moderate. They are now still considered as the marginal or as radicals by the “establishment”. But it could very well be the new normal.

The basis of the theory of Dmitry Orlov is a societal comparison of the USA with the collapse of the former Soviet Union. After the collapse of the USSR, the citizens were faced with severe unemployment and resource shortages. The reason why nobody directly died of malnutrition was that they have never completely trusted to depend on state social security. The only social security that is holy in Russia is the right on daily bread. And the state managed at least to get its distribution going. Together with the fact that practically all families have some kind of access to a private plot of land for additional food, the country dragged itself through mainly on the shoulders of the working women and pensioners (according to Orlov, a significant part of the men were busy with hassling, fighting, drinking and being depressed about their lost jobs). This kind of resilience we do not have in Europe and the USA. The general lack of resilience makes us very vulnerable for societal collapse. RebelFarmer was established in order to offer training how to live on local resources and get back in contact with nature. And the most serious training we offer is indeed in Eastern Europe!

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