Matthew Savinar

Peak Oil guru Matthew Savinar is freakin' scary:

3. What's the #1 thing I can do to make my community more prepared for Peak Oil?

Start a business that is likely to survive or thrive in age of expensive energy and then hire some young men between the ages of 16 and 25 or so. A large body of underemployed or unemployed young men will go a long ways toward rendering your other efforts at relocaliztion and preparation null and void. If they don't have jobs you won't have a garden for very long. They must be either gainfully employed or controlled via force. Either find jobs for them or start arming yourselves to defend what you got from them. No economic opportunities for the young men in your community = your community gets burned to the ground. Prepare to employ them or control them.

Scariest thing about Matthew Savinar? He may not be wrong.

At first, Peak Oil looks like an apocalyptic conspiracy theory. It's literally about the End of the Civilized World.

But what really matters is not what the theory feels like at first glance. What matters is whether the facts are there. When I investigated the JFK-assassination conspiracy theories, which aren't necessarily crazy on the surface (the CIA does do bad things, for example), the facts simply weren't there. Every theory except the Oswald-did-it theory falls apart, most of them rather quickly.

But when I look into Peak Oil theories? The facts are there. I keep digging, and all I find are new facts that support the notion that we are at the beginning of the end of the Oil Age--and we're not ready.

Nobody knows exactly how or when we are going to crash. But that we're going to crash? It's not really a question.