Copyright is the result of our requiring money to share our gifts

A friend recently made a statement about  ’thieving’ words as she quoted some powerful words she’d found on another friends page. This thought of ‘thieving’  comes from a generally accepted paradigm that words, like skills and products are owned and can be exchanged for money.

Seeing this word has given rise to some contemplation about copyright and whether messages or indeed any of our gifts should be ‘owned’.   I am beginning to believe that there is no thieving.  This is not easy for I have made a living in the past from selling my words through self-help books.

We crave money because our basic needs aren't met. If they were we could use our gifts as TRUE gifts

Copyright and ownership and thieving are all restrictions and ‘abuses’ stemming from the love of the wrong god – the god of Money instead of loving God the All-One, All-that-is.

We feel guilty at ’stealing’ another’s words and I too have felt a sense of ‘being robbed’, when my words weren’t credited to me. But that is because we have learned to use our ‘gifts’ as a means to supply us with our needs.

But I sense this is  my ego taking hold and I could learn, as we all could, that our creative gifts, including the good words that we send out  from our own channelling of what is right should not be copyright or used for selfish purposes.  And yet this goes against a paradigm in this world that who writes the words has ownership and that ownership can be used for personal commercial gain.  What a struggle this is…

And it’s a struggle because we need our basic needs to be met in order to survive.

Wouldn’t a truly self-less lover of humanity, and I am struggling with this, as an  ego-bound human, wish only for his or her words to carry the message and know that the message is more important than the messenger.  In other words, our gifts should not be gifts for us to selfishly profit from but  GIFTS TO HUMANITY.  And if our basic needs are met, we can truly use our gifts as gifts.

Breaking the circle of selfish concern

We are trapped in a circle of needing to meet our basic requirements, and having to use our gifts in exchange for ‘money’ in order to purchase those basic needs.   And we are trapped in a a mesmeric trance of believing we need more than the basics in order to be happy.    We learn that we can feel good when we buy a new pair of shoes, when we can purchase a planet ticket or buy gourmet food or anything beyond our basic needs.

Breaking the circle of gifts for money is one of the most challenging things we can do.

We need to break the circle of money, supply basic needs to all and enter the circle of gifts

I therefore declare that all words I put out are free to all to resubmit.  I do not ask for credit, but I do I ask that no one claims these words as their own or uses them to make their own selfish profit, but,  instead, uses them for the good of all.  The free Commons License states that the words may be freely passed on as long as they remain intact.   And even that should not be written in stone.

Sharing with Integrity for the Greater Purpose

If a particular message has been crafted, and changing it may change the original intent then it should remain intact, if the change is used to skew the intent in a way that it is NOT for the greater good.  If someone finds a way to pass on this message by changing the words I have used or using them as a basic jumping off point and by doing that they give greater power to the message, then, I must, if I am considering the greater good, be happy to have this happen.

Telling ourselves the complete Truth.

God knows the truth about us. Do we?

Granny Matthis, who is 97 and strives to be very pure said to me ‘God knows everything about us’  He knows all our transgressions and beyond that he knows when we are being really true. Humans are easily able to justify their actions through deeply seated personal lies that even we don’t recognize.

On our website we state that people may copy or use the words and we ask for a link back to us.  If I am to examine my motives I must recognize that while we would like people to go to our site and read the rest of our words, for we have some well crafted messages I also see a deeper motive.  We have affiliate links to products we like, so I know that my desire for that back-link is partly  based on our need to make the dreaded money.

And, like me, you have to live.   What is wrong here is the way we’ve been taught to ‘make a living’ versus ‘living life’.  We’ve been taught to pursue money to have a life, when living life in our true purpose is all we need to do.  And to do that we need to have our basic needs met.

This leads me to the philosophical contemplation of how I long to have no need to sell anything to make money and also to how I can regulate my acquisitoin of money so that ONLY AS LONG AS THE MONEY SYSTEM STILL EXISTS, I am directing it through who I am, to be for the greater good.

Embracing a simpler life is a small step towards freeing ourselves from the money system

We are in a transition phase from using money as the medium of exchange and all of us being focused on satisfying our own individual needs to a world where our basic needs are met and we can truly offer our gifts as gifts.  We must begin by simplifying our lives and working towards ensuring everyone has the basic simple gifts of life.

So right now I’m having to make do and do the best I can.

Praying for the minimum we need to live our purpose and share our gifts v praying for stuff

God, please give me only what I need to be able to freely share my gifts with the world

When I pray to God for ’stuff’ I try not to ask for a car or a horse or ten dollars. I try to ask that God will give me enough that I may continue to live on this earth and be able to do the work I was put here to do in relation to the greater good.

This is something I am trying hard to be.. a servant of God of the Greater Force of this Universe… and of course, I have had years of ego training to the contrary.  I am praying that I will continue to develop this way of being.. and it is a struggle.. Life here on earth and living right is not easy… it is part of the evolution of humans into higher purpose non-egoic other-centered entities.

And we get greedy and live from selfish concern because we are biologically driven to have our basic needs supplied.  And in that drive, we’ve lost sight of what ‘basic’ means and struggle to acquire things so that we can feel good.  Yet feeling good should come from living a natural earth connected life.

WHEN WE SUPPLY THE BASICS TO ALL HUMANS – EVERY-ONE’S GIFTS CAN BE TRUE GIFTS

Air, Food, Shelter, Water, Love are humanity's basic needs and rights. Let us strive to achieve that

So how can we allow more and more of us to share our gifts freely?

It brings me to the theory I first learned from the Venus Project material and which is based on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of basic human needs.

Maslow saw that we have a hierarchy of needs and the diagram shows the most necessary at the bottom of the triangle and so on.   Our most necessary need are air to breathe, water and shelter from the elements as well as procreation.  Next in importance is security. We need to know that there will always be a place to lay our head and that we will be safe from predators. Beyond that, as human animals, we need social interaction and love . And beyond that we need esteem, we need to know that our gift is worthwhile and that it contributes to the world and that we have purpose.

If we were all guaranteed basic water, food, shelter and loving human fellowship, then any gifts we have whether it is one for spinning emotive words or building a cob oven, can be just that.. a true gift to the world.

Wow, my conscience and ego are already fighting this.. as I can imagine yours might also.

And this all comes from the one root of belief that dominates most cultures on earth today – we own our gifts and they can be used in exchange for money and thus for our own personal security.  We are all afraid of not having those basic needs as outlined by Maslow.  So we sell ourselves in order to find them.  And we become selfish.  We accumulate for us because we are AFRAID OF NOT HAVING ENOUGH.

What a paradise might we live in if we were so content with the basic needs that giving our gifts was not done out of necessity for those things, but because we are free to give them.. for we no longer need to sell them.

If you knew that you had a place to lay your head that allowed you to sleep well and be fit for the day to come and you had good healthy food and clean water to nourish you with sufficient energy to engage in the world and you knew you had companionship and social interaction… what else do you really need?   How much easier would it be for you to freely share the gifts that you previously sold to get more than you need?

When you take some time for honest inner contemplation you might find that you have been easily able to justify your quest for stuff and money and that you may be telling yourself lies by pretending that you are doing good works, when in fact you are actually satisfying more than your basic needs because you’ve been programmed through fear to think you cannot live without them.

We are in tough transition times and each and every one of us needs to take stock and start telling ourselves the deep honest truth about our own fear and our own greed…

Purpose beyond self and community

If, for example we desire to build an intentional community, we will probably be motivated from a need to meet our own basic needs.  We will come together with that community, in the same way we do with the nuclear family and kin and build a stronghold that will satisfy our community.   But if we don’t take count of the rest of the pattern, those without our walls, we cut ourselves off from the greater purpose of humanity as one unity.

When we can build that community with a focus on meeting our basic needs so that we can facilitate the entire community to release their gifts and that those gifts are used for the purpose of helping those beyond our little clique, then we’ve truly got it.

It’s a long hard road but we won’t survive in loving harmony and recreate the Garden of Eden if we don’t find a way to give all humans what they need to be able to freely share the gifts God gave us.

© 2010, Pierre Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

Bruce Thompson*
November 22, 2003

This document offers a comprehensive  summary of the current oil crisis situation, what is going to happen, the inadequacy of expected solutions, how it will affect YOU, why public warning is so late, WHAT YOU CAN DO with more information via links to sites discussion groups and contacts.  You can also download this document from links at the end.

Feed the Future Note – This document was written SEVEN years ago.  The crisis is much more imminent.  Alongside that we have the rise of genetically modified food, natural disasters and more.

YOU CAN MAKE a DIFFERENCE but you MUST ACT NOW. Read this document to inform yourself about peak oil and the implications AND why we must localize food growing.

Oil & Gas Shortages Soon, Final Emptying of Wells

Summary

This document reveals that in this decade:

• After a hundred years of exploration and extraction very little new oil and gas is being found. See graph.  Today, for every barrel of oil discovered, the world consumes four barrels.
• When energy get scarcer and dearer there is very serious disruption of transport, industry, business, government and private life.

Serious shortages and disruptions

• Globally, 90% of transport (road/rail/air/sea) depends on oil. So does industrial & farm equipment (food).
• Much natural gas is used by power generating stations to generate electricity. Gas shortages can therefore trigger grid outages that disable computers, communications and electronic control equipment.
• More than 500,000 oil & gas-based products will also become scarcer and dearer: plastics, clothing, asphalt, tyres, medicines, sealants, inks.

Alternative energy sources cannot compensate

• Hydrogen is not the answer because it is actually made from natural gas, which itself is running out.
• Hydroelectricity, coal, nuclear, windmills, solar etc. cannot be increased sufficiently in time to prevent seriously disruptive shortages of energy.

Difficulties adapting

• Changeovers take years. Our immense existing infrastructure was built assuming plentiful fuels. (Cars, globalization, suburbs, arctic/tropical cities.)
• Changeovers demand fuels to implement them too.
• Coal, nuclear, oilsands etc involve serious pollution of air/water/soil. They use oil/gas/electricity to exploit them.
• The energy decline is strange, unwelcome news to the public. There is confusion, resistance and delay.

Evidence of decline of oil and gas

Some people still say oil and gas are abundant, and that money and technology will meet needs for decades. But oil and gas industry data show:

• A clear, 40-year trend of less and less discovery of oil. (See graph at top of this page.)
• In regions including USA, the North Sea, Norway, New Zealand there is obvious decline of oil and gas.
• Global oil supply is 70% from pre-1972 wells
• Steadily decreasing output from the existing wells.
• Big military takeovers of oil & gas resources.

Timing and severity

• North America’s gas supply: Start of decline: about 2003 – 2004. Electricity is 20% gas-powered. Grid blackouts, brownouts in North American workplaces, cities, homes, Internet system, economy. Importing gas is seriously constricted by lack of ships and suitable port equipment.
• Global oil supply: ‘Conventional’ (easy-to-extract) oil: Decline from about 2005 on. Expect higher prices not only for fuels, but all goods and services because all require energy to create and deliver them.
  ‘Unconventional oil’ (Expensive deep sea, polar, etc): Decline about 3% a year  from 2009 on.
• Competition: Prices are affected by fierce global competition for oil and gas. Scarcity for one kind of energy also raises the price of the other forms, such as electricity or coal.
• Duration of decline: Forever. Oil and gas took millions of years to form, in extremely rare conditions. Regeneration rate is practically zero.

World now consumes four barrels of oil for each barrel discovered

• Barrels consumed globally/year: 28 billion (2002).
• Barrels discovered globally per year: 6 billion of “conventional” plus 8 billion deep sea, oil sands etc. Discovery of oil fluctuates each year, but peaked in the 1960s, and has declined at an average of about 9 billion barrels per year over the past 40 years.
• Pre-1973-discovered oil in use today: More than 70% of present global supply. We’ve mostly just been using up huge old oil fields.
   

Those figures, & the above graph of discoveries are at http://dieoff.org/page85.htm  and http://dieoff.org/page90.htm

Proportion of global energy provided by oil

• In developed countries 40% (1997)

Inadequacy of Expected Solutions

The “invest more to find it” idea

Yet-to-be located oil, globally

After a century of exploration, the earth’s geology and oil resources are generally well known. When the fields are emptying, money only helps to scrape out the hard-to-reach remainder. There are 210 billion barrels left to discover and 1000 billion barrels left to extract. This is indicated by the 40-year decline in discovery of oil. No amount of money will create oil that simply isn’t there.

Number of oil wells already in world/USA

More than 500,000. In USA, 80% of the wells now produce less than three barrels a day.

Percentage of oil recovered from a typical oil well

20% to 60%. It relates primarily to the viscosity of the oil. You get less from a heavy oil than a light one because it sticks in the reservoir.

“Technology will solve it” idea

Challenge to technology

To compensate for the expected 3% oil decline (at today’s 28 billion barrels a year), create and install, by year 2009, permanent supplies of portable energy, equivalent to 840 million barrels of oil a year. Then as oil keeps declining forever, increase this new energy it until it replaces 40% of the world’s oil  supply (22 billion barrels a year) OR reduce energy demand equivalently as the global population increases by almost a quarter million people every day.

The “better efficiency” idea

Increases in efficiency usually fail to reduce consumption (more m.p.g. just causes people to travel more or buy two cars, or other goods) unless they are personally determined to reduce energy consumption.

What about nuclear power?

Nuclear supplies 16% of the world’s electricity. Its ability to soften the oil and gas crash is problematic:

• Past accidents. Risk of more, and terrorism.
• Many more reactors would be needed, at huge cost, against local opposition.
• Tons of radioactive materials to transport at risk to public.
• Nuclear waste disposal is still the major, unresolved problem, especially breeder reactors producing plutonium – a nuclear weapon/terrorist raw material, half-life contamination is 24,000 years.
• All abandoned reactors are radioactive for decades or millennia.
• Nuclear is not directly suitable for aircraft and vehicles.
• Adapting nuclear to make hydrogen or other fuels would be a huge, and energy-expensive project.
• Nuclear fusion is still not available, after 40 years’ research and billions of dollars invested.

Note from Feed the Future.  Obama is considering bringing two nuclear plants to Georgia in spite of all the evidence above.

Natural gas

Proportion of global energy provided by gas

20% of global energy supply (1997).

Natural gas is also running short

Demand in North America is already outstripping supply, especially as power utilities take the remaining gas to generate electricity. Later in this web page there is a graph suggesting important effects of gas decline on the electricity used for computers, communications and control equipment.

Gas is not suited for existing jet aircraft, ships, vehicles, and equipment for agriculture and other products. Conversion consumes large amounts of energy and money. Natural gas also does not provide the huge array of chemical by-products that we currently get from oil.

Hydro-electric

Present use: 2.3% of global energy supply (1997). Many rivers are already exploited.

As a replacement for oil:

Very minor compared with 40% provided at present by oil. Unsuitable for aircraft and the present 800 million existing fuel-powered cars.

Coal

Current global use

24% of global energy supply.

As a replacement for oil

Is 50% to 200% heavier than oil per energy unit. Bulky and dirty. Expansion of coal mining, causes land ruin, and increases greenhouse gas emissions.

Hard to fine-control the rate of burn

Tuning the rate of burn of oil and gas fuels is easy, but coal is different. It is therefore is used in power stations to make electricity, wasting half of its energy content.

Coal mining operations run on oil fuels

Present coal-mining machinery and transportation runs not on coal, but on oil-based fuels.

Pollution

A single coal-fired station can produce a million tons of solid waste each year. Burning coal in homes pollutes air with acrid smog containing acid gases and particles. (Smog, greenhouse gases, and acid rain).

Liquid fuels from coal

Very inefficient, and huge amounts of water required.

Solar and wind

Global solar use

• Is about 0.006% of global energy supply. Energy varies constantly with weather or day/night. Not storable or portable energy like oil or natural gas so unsuited for present vehicles and industry. Batteries bulky, expensive, wear out in 5-10 years.
• Photovoltaic solar equipment (US$4/watt) is about 15% efficient, giving about 100 watts of the 1 kW per square meter exposed to bright sunshine (enough for one light bulb). A typical solar water panel array can deliver 50% to 85% of a home’s hot water though.
• Using some of our precious remaining crude oil as fuel to manufacture solar & wind equipment may be wise.

Global wind power use

0.07% of 1990 global energy supply. As with solar, energy varies greatly with weather, and is not portable or storable like oil and gas. Each wind turbine from Denmark produces an average of 698 kW averaged over a year.

Hydrogen

Current global use

US (only) 1998 consumption is 0.01% of global energy.

As a replacement for oil

• Hydrogen is currently manufactured as from natural gas, which is running short. It is therefore an energy “carrier” not a source.
• It can be produced in other ways, such as electrolysis, but always with a loss of the energy needed  to do that. Usually it is better to simply use the original energy directly.

Other sources of energy

Options

Shale, tar sand, coalbed methane, ethanol, biomass (from vegetation), etc.

Effectiveness as replacements for oil

• Huge investment in research and infrastructure to exploit them, plus large amounts of now-expiring oil supply.
• A major problem is that they cannot be exploited before the oil shocks cripple attempts to bring them on line, and the rate of extraction is far too slow to meet the huge global energy demand.

How It Will Affect Us

Food supply

Food production & delivery depends on oil

Food grains now contain between 4 and 10 calories of fossil fuel for every 1 calorie of solar energy. Example: 4% of USA’s energy budget is used to grow food, while 10 to 13 percent is needed to process it and transport it onto plates.

Fertilizers are made from natural gas. Grain yield without fossil fuel support can fall from 130 bushels/acre down to 30 bushels/acre. The worsening fuel shortages will make agriculture increasingly expensive and land-needy. Localizing agriculture closer to cities will help, as will more-vegetarian diets.

Efficiency

70% of all grain grown is used to feed animals for human consumption

The meat feeds 1/5 as many people as the grain could.

Number of cats & dogs in USA

131 million

Food given to pets

North American pet food business is $30 billion/yr, and is growing.

“Future food” being consumed by using gasoline in vehicles

Gasoline consumed ‘now’ will deprive future agriculture of energy for producing food.

Below are examples of how much “future food” a 30 mile-per-gallon vehicle is “eating” now. Also shown is the heavy physical labor humans will have to do in future when gasoline is unavailable for farm/industrial/office/home machinery:

• Bread, 1 kg loaf = 6 miles = one slice per 422 yards That 1/5 gallon = human heavy farm labor for 23 hrs.
• Beef, 1 kg = consumed by driving 76.2 miles That 2.5 gallon = human heavy farm labor 300 hrs.
• Canned corn 1 kg = consumed by driving 5.4 miles Again, 1/5 gallon = human heavy farm labor 20 hrs.

Transportation, Business, Globalization

Oil for transportation

• Automobiles, globally: 722 million
• Automobiles, USA: 132 million
• Trucks (all types) in USA: 1.5 million (all types) in USA:
• Buses: (all types) in USA:: more than 654,000
• Locomotives: USA: 26,000
• World aircraft fleet: 11,000 aircraft of more than 100 passengers. All 11,000 designed for oil-based fuel.
• World shipping: 85,000 ships in world.
• Decked fishing boats in the world: 1.2 million

Globalization

Will end. (Fuel costs & scarcity).

Oil for industry

Construction industry example: Energy to build an energy-efficient home is equivalent to 6,500 gallons of gasoline.

Number of by-products of oil

Over 500,000 including fertilizers, medicines, lubricants, plastics (computers, phones, shower curtains, disposables, toys, etc.), asphalt (roading and roofs), insulation, glues/paints/ caulking, (modern synthetic rubber) tires and boots, carpets, synthetic fabrics/clothing, stockings, insect repellent.

Government Services, Economy

City drinking water, government services

• Number of cities in the world: over 55,000
• Services to consider: Water supply pumping, sewage disposal, garbage disposal, street/park maintenance, hospitals & health systems, police, fire services. National defense (land, sea, air).
• Possibility of wars over remaining oil.

Economy and employment

• International oil import costs: Sharp rises (increasing global competition for dwindling oil & gas of five Middle-Eastern countries and former Soviet Union. International tensions.
• National debt, inflation: Money goes out of country, to oil producers. Money gets scarce. Interest/mortgages rise. Government prints more money to pay overseas energy bills. Money devalues. Inflation. Prices rise.
• Poverty: Public, and businesses become poorer paying higher energy costs. Less spending, less sales. Layoffs. Unemployment.
• Welfare costs up, taxes up. Therefore taxes up. Pensions for aging/disabled reduced or discontinued, and devalued by inflation.

Migration

• People will migrate away from hardship into less uncomfortable areas. Locally, regionally, globally.

Other serious quality-of-life aspects

• Heating and cooling: In cold regions oil heats buildings (burned as fuel in homes or in oil-fired electric power stations). In hot areas oil power provides air conditioning. As natural gas is substituted for oil, the gas price will rise too.
• Smog: Energy price and shortages will increase wood and coal burning in homes, increasing city smog.

Why Public Warning is so Late

Normal business and political posturing

For business and political reasons, there have been very misleading reports of sizes of stocks of oil:

(a) By firstly understating discoveries, and then later overstating discoveries, oil companies have given the false, but pleasing impression of an increasing discovery trend. Investors respond accordingly, and finance more exploration.

(b) The seven major oil-extracting countries have for years reported unchanged reserves (even though they were extracting and selling billions of barrels of oil, and that the reserves would therefore be less each year). See table of “spurious reserve revisions” shown below.

(c) In 1988 five of those countries claimed they each had about twice as much reserve oil as in 1987. See graph below, based on tables from < http://www.hubbertpeak.com/campbell/images/com12.gif >.

d) We, the public have enjoyed using up the gasoline, heating oil, plastics, and countless other oil products for decades. The oil kept flowing generously. We “looked on the bright side” and mostly ignored warnings by environmentalists that fossil fuels would run out. Media constantly announced new oil discoveries, and increasing stocks of oil. Emptying wells seemed decades in the future. Nobody planned for it. Now they really are running empty.

(e) OPEC countries need to earn as much oil revenue as possible to support rapidly growing populations where the public health care, education and other services are provided free, from oil revenues, not by taxes. They seem especially frightened of alternative energy sources, even though when examined closely, those alternative sources are drastically too small to compensate for oil. “As a group of fossil fuel exporters, OPEC stands to lose more than most from any proposals that threatens to cut oil consumption,” – Rilwanu Lukman, the Secretary General of OPEC, speaking at the 16th World Petroleum Congress, Calgary, 2000. (Globe & Mail Newspaper, June 5, 2000.)

Economic theory says exhausted resources always replaced

Economists have taught us the illusory theory that market demand will always generate suitable solutions. This ignores any physical limitations of the earth, human resourcefulness, or time needed. Example quote:

“Minerals are inexhaustible and will never be depleted. A stream of investment creates additions to proved reserves, a very large in-ground inventory, constantly renewed as it is extracted… How much was in the ground at the start and how much will be left at the end are unknown and irrelevant.” 

 Feed the Future note – BULL 

That is from Professor of Economics, Emeritus, Morry Adelman, who has long been one of the world’s foremost energy and resource economists and a leading analyst of international oil and gas markets. The quote is on page xi of his book, The Economics of Petroleum Supply, M.A. Adelman, published 1993.

 They lied to us

Certain countries reported that oil stocks were “not declining”, even though oil was being taken out, steadily emptying the wells.

Certian countries spectacularly increased the reported quantities of oil in stock, so that OPEC would recognize them as bigger suppliers and allow them to export more, increasing revenues. They were desperately competing with each other to make up their revenue by having a bigger slice of market share, because the price per barrel had plunged to about $12 per barrel.

The history graph of the information on all this prices is at  http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/chron.html

What You Can Do

Feed The Future Note - If your local town has a transition organisation, join it.  If not, start one.   Get together with your community to increase community and local fortitude and work together to create ‘energy descent’.   Look up transition towns on google.

Personal preparations

Reduce energy dependence of family, home, lifestyle. The less fuels and goods you consume, the less affected you will be..

Workplace

Observe, reduce energy need. Talk with friends, workmates, neighborhood, city, governments. The ideal use for remaining oil and mineral reserves is into industries that create inexhaustible alternative energy equipment like windmills, solar water heaters, biomass (vegetation that creates fuels), etc.

Share your feeling with others

Try to stay positive and active rather than ignore it or blame people for it. Where there’s life there’s hope, especially if we all collaborate and are creative.

“It’s not that new”. Humans have always faced hardships, and many among us do so constantly now. Learn from them.

Possible emergency measures to consider

• Alert the public so people understand the energy decline and cooperate to adapt to it. This includes alerting your city council and local media, the government. Everyone needs to collaborate, at all levels.
• Prepare the community for conserving and rationing of dwindling fuels & oil/gas-derived products.
• Discontinue projects that assume abundant fuel, such as road widening, overseas trade
• Re-localize life, business. Un-globalize
• Relocate food production nearer to cities
• Feed the Future note- learn about permaculture and how you can create forest food gardens that contain all nutrients for health and wellness and will in a few years supply YOU and your family or community AND have surplus
• If you already have children, STOP NOW Population control IS VITAL to prevent children being born into extremely harsh conditions that seem likely, and to conserve soon-scarce resources for those already alive.
• Reconsider immigration, which adds load – Feed the Future Note - don’t run off somewhere else, it’ll be the same everywhere.
• Strengthen the police and army to deal with social chaos & to control distribution of  supplies. Feed the Future Note

  – we don’t agree with this. Strengthen your own defences and start to care and share, make sure you have your own community supplies and encourage other communities to do so, sharing with those nearest to you.

• Alert national leaders to organize well against this major threat that faces us all.  Feed The Future Note – this was written in 2003.  Our sense now is that national leaders are not interested in taking the measures we need because they are too concerned about securing resources for the moneyed few. THEY WILL NOT HELP US WE MUST HELP OURSELVES.

Feed the Future – additional info on what to do

1. Start shifting your lifestyle now into a more ‘return 2 earth’ simpler one.  Research how to do this. (Adapting to new ways of life takes time and effort so it’s to your advantage to start now). Repurpose, Recycle, ReUse, Refuse to buy stuff that travels thousands of miles to get to your table or home

2. Learn new skills in order to become as self-sufficient as possible; in terms of food, water, energy, and personal transport.

That means a large productive community/ home vegetable garden and more particularly a permaculture style food forest garden to compensate for reduced commercial food production and higher prices.  Start canning and preserving food.   Get yourself an emergency food supply.  Investigate  renewable energy generation – get a wind tower or some solar panels.   Start to conserve water by adding water catchment systems to your home.   Change your water outlet system so that greywater [from sinks, bathrooms [not toilets] and kitchens flow into your garden

3. Promote community re-localization to your family, friends, neighbors, colleagues and community leadership; reducing your dependency on long-distance supply chains. Redirect your purchases toward locally produced agriculture and goods, local services, and local and decentralized energy production.

4. Reduce or eliminate your fossil fuel use as much as possible, especially for transportation — use mass transit, bike, or walk. Work closer to home. Support alternative, renewable fuels. Increase the energy efficiency of your home. Withdraw support for further development of highways, urban sprawl, and large personal vehicles.

5. WARNING  If you wait to start preparing, the resources you need or the conditions you count on to adapt may be exhausted, too expensive, or no longer viable. For example, if you wait until things get tough to trade in your SUV for a hybrid or plug-in car, there may not be any left (due to demand), and there may be no one willing to take that SUV in trade.

Prepare Yourself NOW

Order a year’s supply of freeze dried food, buy a solar oven,  get batteries to see you through in times of power outages.  These items are designed  to keep you going while you transition into a more local, self sufficient, regenerative lifestyle .  Be prepared for emergencies and for the future NOW.

Pass this document on to everyone you know.   Talk to people everywhere.
More Information and Contacts

Documented evidence

You can obtain two versions of this document “The Oil & Gas Crash and You”:

• “Shorter Version”, available as a two-sided, one-sheet handbill that you can give to other people (It contains most of the contents of this web page). < http://www.geocities.com/RunningOnEmptyNZ/_FactSheet.doc
• “Full version”, a 12-page resource for researchers and journalists, containing extra references and authorities, and more explanations and links. http://www.geocities.com/RunningOnEmptyNZ/OCAY19.doc

Websites

• http://www.hubbertpeak.com/duncan/olduvai2000.htm   The Peak of World Oil Production and the Road to the Olduvai Gorge,by Richard C. Duncan, Ph.D. Pardee Keynote Symposia Geological Society of America Summit 2000 Reno, Nevada November 13, 2000.

This paper suggests that decline of natural gas may be the most disastrous event from year. 2007 (or sooner, see updates) because of resultant shortage of electricity for computers, communications and control equipment.

The following sites are conveniently keyword-searchable for research. They have lots of scientific and oil industry literature about energy resources and the ecology generally. They are heavily annotated with authoritative references and links:

• http://www.hubbertpeak.com/  Named after the late Dr. M. King Hubbert, geophysicist, this website provides data, analysis and recommendations regarding the upcoming peak in the rate of global oil extraction.

•  http://www.dieoff.org/ This untidy, emotional site is nevertheless a very large, valuable resource. It’s full of reputable energy-related and environment-related reports and papers, conveniently assembled in one place by researcher Jay Hanson.
• www.oilcrash.com is a New Zealand activist website operated by Robert Atack. It is especially useful for downloading audio and video recordings of the world’s most prominent speakers as they notify the public about the decline of oil and gas, and the implications.

Discussion forum – Technical/scientific

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/energyresources  (restricted membership at about 450, to prevent newcomers posting material already discussed, but there are ten thousand previous postings keyword searchable.)

Discussion forum – Implications, action

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RunningOnEmpty2 which is the current discussion group.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RunningOnEmpty which is now closed, but there are ten thousand previous postings in the archives for researchers by keyword search. Monitored the energy decline by featuring news items about it, and discussed countless implications at personal and societal level. Membership by request to bthomson@e3.net.nz.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RunningOnEmpty2OnEmpty2  After 10,000 messages in RunningOnEmpty, this group has continued the discussion, reserving the original egroup as a VIP conference egroup, and as an archive.

Author of “The Oil & Gas Crash and You”

Bruce Thomson, author of this article is  a technical writer in Palmerston North, New Zealand. He moderated the original RunningOnEmpty group, and is the moderator of that RunningOnEmptyNZ2internet forum.

There is no institutional financial sponsoring or influence of Bruce Thompson’s  page or the forum.

Some moral authority to expose the Convince Sheet to the public was gained. After weeks of debate (3,100 forum message) there was a poll of 280 members. We all knew the announcement would be disturbing, with possibly serious impacts on the public, the stock market and general business and personal confidence. Of those 280 polled, 62 members responded, and over 85% of them voted in favor of exposing the truth.

Perceived advantages of informing the public were

• People might cooperate better with governments, instead of innocently demanding more energy or insisting on lower fuel taxes (As fuel imports cost more and more, cutting taxes will just impoverish governments, and cause cuts in services like health care, education and social welfare. A great deal of energy conservation is possible, and is a better solution.)
• People can make correct decisions for themselves personally (to have less children, plan cheaper transport, safer jobs, pay off debts, consume less, conserve energy more, etc.
• All the cleverest minds and wisest leaders of the world could work on the problem. With them helping, and an understanding public, we might fare better than if everyone continues innocently wasting the remaining energy and bringing the oil and gas crash to us faster and sooner.

You may copy freely to others…

• This web page (you can refer people to it: http://www.geocities.com/RunningOnEmptyNZ   
• ‘The Oil &Gas Crash and You’ files. This shorter one, and the full version are downloadable at… http://www.geocities.com/RunningOnEmptyNZ/OCAY19SHORT.doc  http://www.geocities.com/RunningOnEmptyNZ/OCAY19.doc

• http://www.geocities.com/RunningOnEmptyNZ/OCAY19.doc http://www.geocities.com/RunningOnEmptyNZ/OCAY19.doc

There are no political or commercial allegiances associated with this document it was created as a personal enquiry, and in the public interest.

© 2010, Pierre Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

A community forest garden is a vital cog in the wheel of transition, that we must inevitably spin into. It is a transition from oil based consumption and materialistic lifestyles and emerge into simple satisfaction, self-sufficiency, self-reliance, local sustainability and smaller group inter-dependence. 

There’s no doubt that big changes are pushing their heads above ground and that we must begin now to prepare.  If we do we WILL ride this wave and emerge refreshed and renewed.. landing on new shores of potential. 

To us, as long time observers of the social shifts, it does seem that we, today, are present to a crumbling of ‘what was’ and an emergence into a new way. 

As information spreads and things seem to happen much much more quickly [people can connect, share ideas, start groups, research through the internet] more people are aware.   Ideas are beginning to synchronize like women who live together experiencing their menstrual cycles synching with each other.  

We are being pushed towards finding creative alternatives for our basic needs which are safety, shelter, food, wellness and connection to other from intimate, family, friends, neighbors into the community and beyond.

And it seems that the place to begin is really at grass roots, one or two people, adding more as the idea spreads, neighbor to neighbor, neighbor to community, community to other communities…and our role exists within our individual community yet as part of the entire whole…ain’t that cool!

 Forest Food Gardens are one part of the great web of emergence.  It is one [jolly good]  way of ensuring abundant, localized community  food and wellness.

Natural Building methods and all the variants thereof offer effective, localized, low cost and resource friendly solutions to providing shelter for all

Shared Land in the form of people offering parts of their land for community shelter/food growing spaces knowing that they will be supported and helped by the community as their generosity melts the divide between have’s and have not’s..

Shared Labor in the form of people working on projects and knowing that they will be fed and sheltered as they help create an abundant world for future generations not just for themselves.

Free energy solutions from those who are fascinated by experimenting with solar/wind, magnetic, water and whatever power.  Like this we can step over the  spirallingly expensive grid electricity and gas-fuelled transportation.

Connection to Other and Community  is the spirit that fuels us to come together and pool our resources, ideas and skills. It is also the spirit that connects one community to another and thus springs the spider network of local communities, trading, bartering, sharing, caring helping….

Living v Working to Live.  In living we bypass the ’middle man’.   Instead of going to work for someone to earn ‘money’ to pay for heat, light, food, entertainment, transport and keeping up with ‘them’, we will expend our energy on living.  

We forsee that there will be a shift towards people using their ‘time’ to dig, plant and tend food forests, collect herbs and concoct tinctures, preserve and prepare food, collect wood, tend the fires, build homes, care for the livestock, school the children…..

This alone would consitute a good enough ‘work’ day. The fruit of your labor is the home, the eggs,the warmth, the nutrition, the healing and the children delighting in playing in ’secret’ hidey hole under the large fruit bushes. 

We are going to have to learn to make do with less, be more independent and self-sustaining, become more hardy and resiliant and come up with creative ways to utilize what we do have in abundance.

And thankfully, something we humans have in abundance is the ability to transcend through adversity via creativity and soar to heights of magnificence and when we pull together.   The evidence is there.

Past Evidence of the Great Human Spirit

A friend’s mother who grew up in the Great Depression of the 30’s said to us the other day ‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about the ‘great depression’ and how people had to live – that’s the way we’d always lived.    Rural folk know how to survive, how to adapt, make-do and use the natural resources. And they know how to pull together as a community from taking food to bereaved neighbors to sharing the surplus of their gardens with those less well off.   They had no other choice.  It was live off the land or die!  And they had a sense of caring for their community.

Anyone in the UK who knows someone who is in their 80’s will have heard tales of how they managed in the 40’s WW2.   Food shortages, nightly bombings in big cities, people being made homeless in an instant were all part of their everyday reality.  A woman recalls how living rurally they had lots of orchards. During WW2 her father dug up the orchards, by himself with the help of a neighbor’s son and planted vegetables that he gave away to locals so that they would have fresh food to eat.

Riding the Wave of Transition Together

So how do we begin to energize a transition wave in our community.   And before you get all scared about official stuff, there is none.   One of the pleasures of living in the rural South is that people just do things… they aren’t too fussed about what the officials think.    They don’t get all bogged down in ‘what about the codes’ or ‘you can’t do that’.  

Here are some initial guidelines…

1.  We have to find our bliss, the thing we love doing that fit into this new kind of living

2.  We may need to develop new skills or link together with others to pool our skills

3.  We have to work with the greater good in mind, knowing that we will be taken care of as long as we are genuine and doing the right thing

4.  We can’t just sit around talking, we have to start doing NOW.  We’ve talked a lot over the last year about how it is and what’s going on and now we are acting.  We went out into the world and connected and followed the leads and found the like-minded energies and we asked for connections, help, guidance…and it comes in

5. We have to be prepared for a bumpy ride as we shift gears, but we must also allow ourselves to experience the vision of living a more natural, earth-based, community centred life… and all the joys that it brings.   There really is nothing like good honest labor to have that feeling of being in the moment and alive. 

 The increasing research and talk around global warming, carbon footprints, oil running out aka post-peak oil combined with evident economic challenges [to use a mildly inoffensive word] and price-hikes everywhere is making a pretty LOUD statement.They are the result of people waking up and getting that we can’t go on living the way we do.

Across the globe people are preparing for transition. There’s even official transition sites and examples of what people in communities are doing to create a more earth-based less oil dependent life.

Forest Food Gardens are part of a transition initiative that is designed to help communities become less reliant on oil derivatives which includes all manufactured items, electrical goods, grid lighting and heating, truck/plane/rail transported food and more reliant on producing what they need for themselves within the community.

THIS is NOT THAT

Please don’t start to label this and compare it to any political movement.  It is not that way.  This is NOT that other ‘c’ word.  It is about human challenges, emergence, freedom and working together and finding creative solutions.

We don’t just need to create food, we need to find ways to harness free energy, build affordable or even free shelter, utilize our land for the community, share our labor and the fruits of that collective labor.  And NO this is NOT anything like the com****** word.    That was awful.   That system was heirarchical and worse still hypocritical. This is something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

This can and will become a global initiative.  The global initiative will not be orchestrated at global level.  It will consist of each individual playing the instrument they play best and all coming together in harmony with others to allow community initiatives to unfold.  We like to think of this transition as a harmonic emergence of humans, a return to earth.  H.E.R.E.

More on the topic of Community Transition

Transition 2 – The just do it’s 12 steps to creating a self-organizing community initiative coming soon

How to set an initiative in motion and avoid energy sapping bureaucracy whilst surprizing and then  inspiring the authorities with what you all achieve.

© 2010, Pierre Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

Our ails are directly due to the fact that we are being sucked into the ‘humanivoros’ black hole of the current monetary system, struggling and mostly failing to ‘keep our heads above water’

Greed and Scarcity – Money by-products

Even if we have money we are often terrified that someday we won’t.   We envy those that have it. We feel sad if we do not.  We lust after it and betray our deep human values for it. We centre our lives on squirreling away resources so that if anything happens we’ll be OK, Jack.   

We keep more than we can ever need as we put up signs saying keep out, private, mine, mine, mine.    We separate ourselves into them and us and we bow to the credo of ‘the survival of those most able to pull in the money and let those who can’t perish’.  

Those of us that have want more and more laws to protect ourselves from those that don’t have whilst finding more and more loopholes so that those that do have don’t have to share it.

Fact is we have become a world of greedy self centred f**kerswho don’t care if they destroy the very world that sustains them as long as they are OK.   We are turning into a pack of Gollums, lusting after our ‘precious’, willing to destroy whatever keeps us from her.

What on Earth went wrong?

 How is it that such awesomely creative, high minded and sophisticated creatures have sunk so low.

We have evolved super potent technological capabilities and nurtured highly developed scientific minds that are capable of researching and generating facilities that can free humans from scarcity, drudge, envy and greed whilst still sustaining and nurturing all life on earth.

Yet the manner in which we use this potency suggests we have devolved to primitive, survival of the fittest, kill or be killed savages.  

 We have devoted most of our creative and innovative energy to finding ways to acquire and protect land, oil reserves and our precious Prada pants.   We go to war with other humans over stuff, resources and money.   We rape and pillage the Earth to provide more stuff, resources and money not caring that we are leaving Gaia half dead and bleeding profusely on the sidewalk of our existence.     

 We have become hardened to anything other than our own selfish needs.

 And in a way we’re not to blame.  For most of our lives, we have been mezmerized by masters of the hypnotic arts.

Deep Hypnosis  

As a hypnotherapist, I, Sunny, understand this process well.   We’ve been asleep in a world of illusion. We’ve  been fed stories of how life is meant to be for so long, so often and so seductively that we utterly believe in them with as much fervor as a muslim believes in the will of allah or fundamental christians believe that jesus is our only savior.   

Hypnosis is very powerful and unbeknown to most of us we have been trapped in  deep and seemingly tender hypnotic trance.  

But the times they are, once again, a changin’ with one big difference since Bob Dylan wrote that song.  Today change is happening exponentially much faster than it was.   

Even as we sleep in arms of the the matrix that feeds on us, we cannot completey switch off from the extensive waves of information and calls to new ways of living that are spreading across the planet.    Everywhere people are coming out of their trance.   In what seems to be a dark world, more and more tiny sparks of illumination are waking us up.    

We are slowly opening our eyes to the illusion and realizing that the way we are living our lives is both crazy, destructive, and utterly illogical.

The Tender Trap

Life is a paradox.   We spend our lives working to make money so we can have a ‘good life’ but we work so hard that we get stressed and are then compelled to spend spend spend to alleviate the stress thereby requiring us to work even harder and … so on.  

We are bombarded daily by mainly poisonous hypnotic thought memes that stealthily penetrate our consciousness on the news and in the raised volume adverts that appear between the syrupy content we are so spellbound by.    

They whisper sweet nothings telling us we will only be happy if we have the latest phone, car or home appliance.  They transport us to a wonder world  where life is oh so perfect as you stroll through life living the illusion that you one of the elite because of what you have.     

They lead you to believe that a $500 pair of shoes will make people sit up, respect and admire you.  And the more you indulge the more dependent your self esteem becomes on having stuff to the point that  you will radically defend your reasons for buying them even if you already have more than enough.  You say ‘it gives me pleasure, they’re better quality, I need retail therapy’… until you are so entranced that you believe it’s OK to spend like that when a billion people live on less than $1 dollar a day.   

They know we are stressed, economically challenged, overworked and depressed and they seduce us in syrupy, gelatinous voices like an over-doting mother ‘Oh sweetie, I know it hurts.  Let mommy make it better’  with Killudan, Diesoonillin, Zombitol and all those other high falutin’ sounding pharma names or credit scheme or dependencies they’re peddling.

And we nod our heads, falling into what sales people call the ‘yes’ set (That’s where the salesperson elicits your needs, getting  you to say ‘yes’ to something enough times so that when they make their move, it appers logical to say ‘yes’ to whatever’s on offer)

We say to ourselves ‘Yes, I am sick’! ‘Yes, I am depressed!’ ‘Yes I’ve got kids to put through college’ and ‘YES! I need help!   And you willingly enter their trance, forgetting that it is not their business to help you but to keep you sick or in debt so that you’ll continue to need their snakeoil.

We  sit in front of the TV feeding on rotten news whilst eating  junk, processed and microwaved food pretending that ‘all natural’ is goo.   We are literally poisoning ourselves in exchange for a moment or few of relief from world realities, the daily grind and our obsessive mind chatter.    

And every day the food industry feeds on our weakness, bombarding us with new offerings of food made tastier, prettier and easier with the help of  MSG, E-numbers, sugars, GMO’s and microwaves.   

Whoopee! Thanks to the deforestation of the Amazon there’s land to raise soy to feed the beef to make a burger that is cheaper than a head of broccoli.  DOH! But as we’re delighting in the burger, we need to wake up to the fact that without that forest, the earth will soon be unfit to sustain man, beef cattle and even that head of broccoli.

In school our children are being peddled lies about the past and how life works as part of the process of training them to conform, compete and function in the current system.    And, like good little soldiers they will emerge with a prolific desire for more money, stuff and power and a readiness to do anything to get it.

And day by day, year by year relentlessly the messages continue to insinuate into our sleepdaze…until a bell goes off..

System Failure Alert – Activate Escape

The good news is that they can’t keep us under for ever.   There are too many alarms going off all over the planet as the system begins to break down.   They are warning signs.  We can wait until it happens or we can wake up now and take action.   

Look at the patterns of the past.   People have been sounding warning signals about all sorts of things. People you know, the alternative researchers, even the traditional news agencies are amongst the few that get it.    Mark these words, in ten years, if we haven’t let go of our rapacious life style, we will not have a  life on earth, let alone a lifestyle.

It’s time to wake up and to the truth

The food, pharma, oil industries and the media are NOT here to help us.  Their disguised strategy is to hypnotise us, damp us down and keep us sick [most produced and processed food makes us sick therefore we need pharma].  Thus the circle turns. 

They addict us to their products thereby supporting a system that makes them very rich leaving us stressed, sick, depressed, angry, fearful and weak.

SO, what has to happen for us to begin to escape the trance, break the evil spell and step into a new way of living?

The Great Escape

• We will begin to escape when we make wellness our goal versus expensive pharmaceutically based health ‘care’. 
• We will begin to escape when we make the generation and delivery of free, sustainable energy a priority versus oil dependency.  
• We will begin to escape when we harness technology, science and nature to generate enough sustainable resources for all versus earth raping war mongering activities.  
• We will begin to escape when we take charge of the education of our children versus subjecting them to someone else’s propaganda
• We will begin to escape when we start making our own investigations versus taking news as reality
• We will begin to escape when we adopt a new attitude to nutrition, home or community grown seasonal food versus processed, junk and microwaveable gunk.  
• We will begin  to escape when we learn to repurpose existing goods versus always acquiring new
• We will begin to escape when we create open sharing community versus gated urban gaols. 
• We will begin to escape when we adopt natural building techniques versus building high rise steel and glass monsters.
• We will begin to escape when we realize that one human or nation is no more important than another versus the us and them sensibility of nationalism
• We will begin to escape when we allow people to share and build on our land versus fencing ourselves in
• We will begin to escape when we make wellness a focus, changing our diets and using natural remedies where possible
• We will begin to escape when we spend more time in close connection to the earth, camping in the forest, learning simple earth-living techniques
• We will begin to escape when we turn off the TV and selectively watch more meaningful movies or go for a walk in the forest
• We will escape as we move from ‘green’ activities to ‘brown living’ Natural, earth based lifestyles, simple and self-sustaining

And above all we will be well on the path to escape when we turn our consciousness outwards sensing ourselves not as an organism struggling for personal survival but as an integral part of the entire universe working symbiotically for the greater good.

Like that we are continually asking ourselves..

 ‘Is this the right thing to do for the greater good versus how it meets my personal needs.

Start Planning Your Escape NOW!

Time is running out.   We have maybe 3 years to begin the exodus and embrace a new way of living before the entire planet is wiped out by us.   Are you ready to move towards the Great Escape?

Help is at Hand

There are internet groups of activists and people all over the planet who have already gone far down the Great Escape Route and they are rallying for all of us. They are there to inform us, help us see another way, teach us how to move from green to brown and lead by example.   

Find out more in this directory of alternative activities and solutions for  creating free and sustainable energy , natural building techniques, land sharing, food production and nutrition, wellness, new forms of community  and viable systems of economy.

Coming Soon –  Life on Earth Part 2 – The Great Escape

Take a peek into our world     www.planetearthship.org

© 2009, Pierre Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes