Post Oil Survival Skills

As the oil age winds down, we're left with freeways but no fuel to drive on them. Largely separated markets with no warehouse because they're based on Just In Time deliveries, and soon empty parking lots. Some of these have already gone bankrupt and empty.

We have suburban neighborhoods 45-60 miles from the cities they're meant to be in, and that same distance from the jobs to pay those mortgages. As Mr. JH Kuntsler points out, this was a huge misallocation of resources. However, the Europeans he loves so well have been correcting these sorts of errors for centuries by retasking real estate and buildings from their obsolete designs into something useful today. They're often awkward and imperfect, but they're still useful. This is the answer to correcting the real estate problems.

The exurbs are often surrounded by fallow (unused) farmland. Kinda like villages. What if those big houses got locked bedroom doors, a kitchen manned by a cook, and offered affordable rates for rent? During the Great Depression, big houses were turned into small apartments called Boarding Houses. They'd rent by the month and food was either included or the kitchen was treated like a small lunchroom with cheap prices, on call. Since we're back in Great Depression economics again (since the current president took office), it would make sense to offer Boarding Houses. With all those unemployed or underemployed adults floating around, a Boarding House would be a good compromise. If the surrounding fields were turned into Market Gardens (vegetable gardens for sale in markets) that provides local employment for the boarders as well as food for the dining room. The more carefully the local soil is developed, the better food it can grow and the more nutritious that food becomes. Exurban neighborhoods and housing developments could become villages with specialized production, including turning the front room into a store, or the garage. Since we soon won't have cars, the garage becoming a shop actually makes sense. Eventually, such places could become actual towns rather than a place to keep your stuff while you sleep, commuting 100 miles or more per day for a job.

A similar approach can be made with Suburbs. Note that Urbus is from Sumerian, the first civilization. It means town or city. Sub-Urbus means village dependent on town, thus the Sub usage. I learned that in my Archaeology class in college, from a Dr. Poe, the man who found Petra. I know it looks like a movie set, but its real and really exists. Great teacher, btw.

Petra was the local equivalent of a truck stop. Like Reno. It had water via some clever irrigation canals carved into the rock on either side of the steep canyon that led their way into the town, which is carved into the rock like this. Since everybody was doing silk-road kinds of pack horses and camels, it made sense. This was adapting resources to appropriate use.

The Suburbs are those areas outside the city itself where housing is cheaper and Cheap Oil made relatively easy to get back and forth to work. It was a compromise, giving up time commuting to and from the city in exchange for a larger house with more privacy. Post oil, with no fuel available for commuting to work, or costing a significant portion of that income to make the commute (which is already happening), families with commuting workers find themselves giving up more and more luxuries until the stress can break them. Thus the high divorce rate. Love is easy when there's money. Not so much when you're both broke. When the pack mules stopped coming to Petra to trade and water their animals, Petra died. When the commuters can't afford to commute, the suburbs will die. Unless something is done.

The way forward for the suburbs is similar to that of the Exurbs. Market gardens, garage businesses, and bulldozing empty homes to make space for the gardens. They're already doing this in Cleveland, btw. They think this will save the value of the remaining homes, and they're selling the empty plots to the adjoining neighbor for $1, with the understanding they will fence the property and use it, not leave it as a vacant lot. This is important. Ownership defines value. Cleveland knows that the Tragedy of the Commons is a major flaw in Socialism, and a big part of why Communism fails, consistently. There has to be profit motive and ownership. Boarding Houses make sense in the suburbs too, and the garage businesses can be more specialized. I think we should expect more manufacturing to turn up in suburbs simply because there's a more educated population base which can provide workers. This is largely true in the industrial districts, which are often unsafe and have poor mass transit options, dumping riders into stations where getting stabbed or raped is the least of your worries. That either gets changed or those businesses will lose all their workers when the cars go away.

Shifting manufacturing out of dangerous areas and back to where people actually live does require some infrastructure, but reliable power and a clean well lighted building space isn't hard to come by. Cheap Solar for the power, former shopping areas for the building space, and hybrid trucks can borrow power from the grid, then use biodiesel or battery charge to make deliveries and pickups. Not perfect, but sustainable. This opens up those abandoned Plazas with their huge parking lots to economic activity again. Imagine former Wallmart stores turned into factory shop space building something useful instead of sitting empty. Those spaces could otherwise be turned into flea-market stalls or local department stores/shops.

I'll also point out that industrial design architects could take your basic car oriented shopping center and convert most of the parking lot into additional shops, a guard shack, and bike racks, with solar panels on every roof, lots of good lighting, and industrial battery to use that power after dark. You'd need a nearby tram stop for all the potential customers. If you have multistory buildings near public transit, turn the bottom floors to shops and the upper floors to apartments with controlled entrance to the elevators keeping out muggers and such. Stopping crime is big business.

And there's quite a few careers that need to happen post oil that have faded into obscurity thanks to Globalism.

• Shoemaker (cobbler). Use modern methods and materials, but make them locally. They can be repaired, too. 
• Tailor. Teeshirts from Dominican Republic or Vietnam? Not much longer. If its going to cost anyway, and you want better treatment, pay for the real thing. It will be more comfortable and you'll get better treatment by showing some class.
• Bicycle and scooter sales and mechanic. Lots of people are inexpert at this, and while they'll eventually develop the skills, paying someone to do it will be an obvious niche. The rates need to be lower. 
• Bicycle Stylist might become a real career too, a sort of mechanic who can turn a beater that gets you stopped by the police into something elegant that lets you ride on by, using paint, better accessories, and the right colors. See CycleExif for examples of elegant bicycles.
• Biodiesel and ethanol fuel seller. Imagine your fuel dealer came to your house, like the milkman, and dropped off fuel and picked up the empty jerry cans or 2L bottles from a lock box by your garage. Since the gas stations are going to go under without cheap gas to sell, and won't touch biodiesel due to its variable quality, nor ethanol from sugar cane or sugar beets because its competition, this is going to be a niche. I could easily see a neighbor becoming expert on this and doing the rounds a couple days a week with a cart or fuel truck. I suspect the fire department and police would want to sign off on it, but it will still happen. Needs must! 
• Neighborhood brewer, making craft beer. In hard times you need booze to relax. I grew up with those, and there was a veritable trade in beers, wines, jams, cheese, wool, yarn, firewood, all quietly bartered back and forth without the IRS knowing. Until 2000, it was still legal to make distilled booze under 5.0 Gal. stock on hand, and unlimited quantities of denatured for personal use as fuel. All without a tax stamp or ATF involvement. This could sell to the local fuel guy, as you need Methanol to make biodiesel since it converts the used cooking oil into triglycerides, part of the chemistry. The local brewer should have his license once he starts trading with more than a couple houses in barter else some goons will break down his doors like during Prohibition. 
• Tire maker. Turns out you can do this in a small shop with an electric heated vat of used rubber and the underlaying tire. Dirty Jobs did a special on a retreads shop in LA and I was kinda impressed how simple and quick it is. We'll need that for motorcycle and scooter tires, and bike tires too. Changing the tread pattern is easy this way. 
• Welder. A welder is important because small industrial ideas can be created in durable metal provided you've got the metal and a TIG welder with power supply, and Argon Gas, which is still pretty cheap. And that can be run on a generator or solar-battery combo. I know how to do this. Its not easy, but it can be done. A welder can build carts. He can build trailers to tow behind your bicycle or motorcycle. He can build a Jeepney around a small engine like they have in Manilla. Its basic transportation, neither fast nor very safe, but its something. The Auto Industry has failed. Its time for home craftsmen to step up with solutions. 
• Short Order cook, for boarding houses. Making food for a boarding house from available food stuffs will get more challenging. I think most dishes will have egg in them, and making eggs taste good will be a daily challenge. Rice as the carbs, veggies for the vitamins, season to cover the blandness. Miso for more protein from soybeans, grown to add nitrogen to the soil. Miso is safe from endrocrine disrupters in raw/cooked soy products like Tofu and TVP. This will be a demanding and probably thankless job. 
• Health Inspector. All these little businesses can impact health and safety, some of which might kill their customers due to inexperience or contamination. While its unlikely they'll be cheating on purpose, mistakes happen. A health inspector should be more of a teacher than cop. Salmonella outbreaks will be a big problem with all the chickens and eggs around. So will cholera and other food poisoning. Some people will be tempted to use untreated human waste to increase vegetable yields, called Night Soil, since its common in Europe and central america. This is why travellers are urged to only eat COOKED veggies, not salads or raw. The cholera goes right to the plant flesh, to the fruit you're eating. 
• Security guard. This is a growth industry. All those shops and no fast way for a cop to get there without oil to power a wasteful cruiser engine. Best be able to run fast and tackle a purse snatcher or shoot an extortionist or home invader. It will be dangerous and much harder than its been in a century. Expect to ride a bicycle and wear a bulletproof vest. You don't need oil to have guns or knives, and desperate people do desperate things. 
• Architect. Redesigns can be smart and tasteful. People with a little money will be willling to have something that works, or a business needing a shop that attracts customers from the outside. An architect will be busy in the next few decades doing these conversions. 
• Construction material recovery and resales. Abandoned buildings can sometimes be stripped, legally or not. Will you care about owners rights if the company that bought the building is Chinese? No. Strip it out, every wire and light fixture. Resell them locally. There's no issues with the police because they aren't Chinese either and we've all got a grudge against them for ruining our economy. The long term consequence of Dumping goods into a market to bankrupt the local production is a disdain for that nation. Since the Chinese are also buying out banks that own the underwater mortgages and seizing properties, stripping houses of construction materials for repurposing makes sense at every level. Better than them getting bulldozed. At least the materials will find a home.

The above careers are the tip of the iceberg, I suspect. These are the obvious jobs. There will be others. Since I now live in a sort of exurb, I'm already seeing market gardens, chickens, and relocalization thanks to the failure of the commuting lifestyle. The people still commuting to Sacramento or Roseville for work seem angry, harried, upset, and are going bankrupt one by one. The locals are surviving by focusing on local sales and services or specialized products they can make locally then export. The Internet is very good to them, and UPS of course. If at all possible, have a job or skillset that favors LOCAL patronage or you can sell your products by mail order.

The other way forward for suburbs is electrified rail, to keep commuters able to reach those city jobs so they can keep paying mortgages and thus property taxes and support businesses. With cheap enough transit running frequently enough, using solar power and batteries to provide the power for the transport, you can retain the transportation economy sustainably. It won't be easy. And for it to be used, it must be convenient. The less convenient, the more stress on families and the more likely the whole thing fails. Its also expensive. Even with cheap solar, you still need high temperature sodium batteries, which means you need a stationary engineer to monitor them 24/7 which means 3 or 4 of them, and you need tram drivers and train drivers to run all those mass transit vehicles, with a good enough wage they won't go on strike and quality people do the job so won't run over children in the cross walks because Muni Drivers DO in SF. Its LEGAL, and they are protected from prosecution because they're saving the lives of their passengers in exchange for running down the idiot who steps off without looking. Used to be a daily thing back in the 1970s and 80s evening news. We were tougher back then. Electrified grid tied buses and trams are the sustainable way forward because they don't rely on batteries, they're a mature technology that's well understood, and they exist in many cities already. The overhead wires are ugly, but you gotta make do.

The alternative to that is biodiesel scooters and motorcycles. The OPOC engine claims it can take advantage of this, but I've never seen a real one or read a single unbiased review. The company making them is taking their sweet time, time we just don't have. I refused to invest in a technology that's not durable and easy to fix or replace and that can only be proven by real world reviews. Common Rail Injection Diesel motors, using old diesel technology like the Hayes mounted in a KLR frame would be fine, but the Hayes is ridiculously overpriced ($19K!) and its not even proprietary technology. So why aren't any auto engineers competing with Hayes? A tiny diesel mounted in an Enduro bike frame? Pure win. The cheaper the final product cost, the better. This has to change. While I applaud Ford for finally bringing their 3-cylinder 1.0 L aluminum block diesel to America after years in Europe, they're also taking their sweet time with it. That would be an ideal engine for a micro-truck, like the kind for deliveries and farm use in Japan, and would offer a lot of domestic options here for towns still converting to overhead electric grid transport. The economy has to survive the transition, even if that economy is itself converting to Post-Oil occupations. We need shoe makers more than we need mortgage or insurance brokers. And telesales? No thank. Bye! We need hands on jobs for our populations, as many as we can get, because Idle Hands do the Devil's Work. And that kind of thing leads to stealing or murder. And that's just a waste of everything.

Finally, the urban areas must fully adapt to non-car transportation. This should be easy, since most people in the inner city are carless anyway. It should be pretty easy for them. The hard part will be the rich moving into the city, and kicking out the poor, then insisting on proper police protection, health and cleanliness standards, maintenance, all of which will come from their taxes. The more rich people, the better the neighborhoods become, which improves police salaries, giving them reason to enforce standards. Thus ends the poverty in the urban core. It takes the end of Cheap Oil to do this, and leaves the wealthy with More Time, since they're not commuting from Suburban Mansions, instead having urban ones. The ruins of flooded ghettoes in New Jersey won't be ghettoes anymore. They're being bulldozed and sold to developers building million dollar mansions to the rich. Better tax base than slums, the poor and their crime get booted out, and everybody who matters is happy. Same thing is happening in SF city. Wealth Concentrates. It sustains itself. It protects itself. It celebrates itself through celebrity and ego stroking. And the poor love watching movies about rich beautiful people. So being rich is clearly Might Makes Right. Isn't that awesome? The rich think so. And the Govt makes sure they're happy. So the poor in the inner city? Your time is over. Move out or suffer the consequences.

Between streetcars, overhead electric buses, bicycles and scooters, and small delivery trucks have pretty well adapted a city like SF to the future. Its really a matter of water supply and potential earthquake damage that limits them. They can get daily farm shipments through the docks, including meat and fresh veggies. This lets them focus on specialized activities, the cream of our sciences and entertainments. While LA is a hodgepodge of neighborhoods and housing developments, The City has always referred to San Francisco. I know this because my Dad is from LA. He moved up to The City, where culture actually happens, in the 1960's and met my mom. LA plays at culture and fails. They just don't have people concentrated enough to reach that critical mass of wealth and creativity like SF or New York do. SF is physically constrained so it concentrates properly. Someday it will be even more wealthy and even more interesting.

As a person, you get to choose where you live by what you want to do. You can farm in the Exurbs, Craft in the Suburbs, or you can Commute into the city as a specialist or servant to the Rich. All of these options have upsides and downsides. Nothing is perfect. 

You may even opt to stay mobile and live in a trailer park as needed. I'm learning from a friend that IT jobs are now all "Contract-Temp" because there's no motivation (thanks to low quality) to keep IT workers around. Things are too unstable, and software patches eventually remove the requirements. Businesses change direction with the economy too. I gave up on IT as a career in 2004, having seen the writing on the wall ("certificate" scams, low quality patches, product support, cheapskate ignorant customers, unreasonable expectations, low return on investment, hardware depreciation, cludged systems, non-competitive contracting, OS scams, trojans, declining pay). I focused on direct support, desktop and training. It saved my bacon and having interpersonal skills is a non-exportable job security. No boiler room telesales can replace me. But I only do IT in a very limited sense. I'm too far out of the game. I get more pay as a handyman operating a drill or shovel than I did as a Tech guy.

If you choose to be in IT, it is in your best interest to live in a trailer and move from job to job. Wire the trailer for IT purposes and self sufficiency. Contract it so you can park the thing in the client's lot so you can avoid paying rent. When the job is getting finished, find the next spot, fuel the tow vehicle and go as soon as you're done and the client has accepted the work and their payment clears the bank. Boom! A suspect many craft jobs can be done like this. Heartland makes trailers that include garage space with a shop, living space in front. They call them Toy Haulers. You need a purpose built truck to pull them, setup for 5th Wheel hitch, but that would pay for itself in time.

Imagine that garage space is used for any sort of machining, locksmith, electronics repair, whatever. There's maintenance jobs that could be run in there too. Or a trailer devoted to that towed by an RV to live in. Adapting your lifestyle to your profession is necessary today. Having space to haul your scooter or golf cart in, and solar panels on the roof? It could work. It seems like such a change from apartments or big houses and fast fancy cars, but that was a delusion of the Cheap Oil world. That's over.

Ultimately, our society and economy must adapt to the Post Oil reality. We're all going to be installing a lot of Solar panels, and shifting from the fun and convenient forms of transportation to the ones that make you stand in the rain and smell other peoples BO, and get your pocket picked or your crotch groped. It won't be fun. We're all going to walk more, and eat less meat, and learn to appreciate quality in a way we never did before, and its going to cost us more of our pay so we'll either learn to ration our money or die of stupidity.

Using fewer non-renewable resources will make us a stronger nation and correct our trade deficit. As our Elders FAILED to do this when times we good, it falls on us to save our grandchildren from either wage slavery or revolution, neither one of which will do us any good. WE have to make the sacrifices because our parents certainly didn't. Cowards. Its up to us to fix this mess, to stand up and be the Adults in a way they never did. It is a daunting task, but who else can do it? At least we were raised to be flexible, thanks to all the changes we've lived through.

I still remember Muscle Cars when that's all there was to drive, and Libraries you had to visit and use a paper card catalog to find a book made out of paper. And it might not even BE there. That was our information storage. And mail that took days to deliver instead of seconds. And phone booths. And Newspapers. Transistor Radios as a selling point. And vacuum tube testers at the local pharmacy. And all sorts of things which have since vanished as technology has changed how we live. Its been a hell of a ride.

The changes we'll go through as oil goes away will be even bigger, but we really don't have a choice. Refusing reality is just choosing to die, and few people actually do that. They sigh, they have a temper tantrum, they get over it, then adapt. You will too.