People ask what I think the biggest danger that we should prepping for these days. I think the answer is quite clear — climate change 🌎 and declining fossil fuel energy.o⛽

People seem think the fossil fuel party can go on forever, consuming even greater amounts of a limited resource each year on grounds that they keep discovering new sources of fossil fuels and better ways to extract it for less money. But we know growth isn’t unlimited, especially for a limited resource. 📉 Carbon, in form of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, may be abundant but by no means is it unlimited. Most geologists will admit we are scraping the bottom of the barrel,🛢 even though mankind has gotten better at turning the bottom of barrel into useful sources of energy and fossil-based products.

Fossil fuels are a lot like a narcotic such as heroin. The more you heroin you shoot in your veins, the better you feel. Withdrawl is painful, it can make you awful sick. The same can be said about fossil energy – even though it’s consumption comes without the stigma of shooting heroin. 💉 More fossil fuels mean more light, more warmth, bigger and faster automobiles, airplanes, and more computing power. Fossil based energy is turned to many products that improve human productivity, warm our hearts, make life more delightful. 💡 Conservation, especially the radical levels of conservation that are going to be needed for mankind to survive have been rejected by mankind.

So what is next for our country? We are already in the distant future we talked about 20 years ago, and we are already seeing the impacts of climate change. Winters are not as cold as they were even 20 years ago. Our resilience to cold in the Northeast has diminished, people seem to struggle more with blasts of cold then in years past. 💥 Severe weather, while always happening, is getting more severe, especially along the coast lines as sea level is rising, slowly but surely. As most of our major cities are built around sea levels, and great masses of poor people live in buildings along the coast, much of the suffering so far has happened there. Even upland, nobody is left free from the impact of climate change.🌎 Snowmobiling, once a popular activity in Upstate NY is now really limited to the snow belts of Tug Hill, Western Adirondacks and areas downwind of Lake Erie, e.g. high peaks of Cattaraugus County.

Peak oil, natural gas, and coal may happen before we know it. Sure, oil and gas prices are low right now, but it’s not clear if prices will remain so low or that drilling is sustainable in the high-cost environment that exists right now. The world seems awash in oil right now, but should chaos break out in the Middle East, things could change quickly.🤷‍ Our economy is so dependent on cheap oil, cheap natural gas, and cheap coal for all forms of energy, we are going to be screwed so quickly should a tipping point be reached. Few things bite at the American Psyche like high prices at the gas station,clearly advertised at every street corner. Few things attack the American way of life then having the ability to motor around cheaply, as much as we desire. Put a high price on motoring fuels,🚙 and watch how quickly peoples lives change.