What is it that drives a guy, mid-career, to drop it all and retire small?
There are many answers, but I am going to address one of the biggies. It may seem a bit incongruous, but the answer is:
Peak Oil.
Plainly put, it is the growing scientific consensus that we are at the world peak of petroleum production. The rate at which we can produce crude oil is at a maximum. It is not that we are running out, it is that we are running out of the ability to find and exploit large new fields that can replace the “elephants” that are currently in decline. So, as the rate of production falls, and world demand rises (on the backs of huge developing economies such as China, India, Russia, etc.)... we have a problem. (Google: M. King Hubbard, Matt Simmons, James H. Kuntsler to read more on peak oil)
Oil is everything. The fuel in our cars (obvious), the lights in our homes (still obvious), the food on our tables (fertilized with petroleum, protected with petroleum pesticides, harvested, processed, and transported with petroleum), the water we drink (pumped, filtered, and disposed of with petro-energy), the products we depend on (plastics! made from and shipped with petroleum)...on and on.
Some argue that the world population boom is the direct human recycling of petroleum. Billions of additional humans on this planet, only because we have been able to stretch the carrying capacity of the ecosystem using fossil fuel. Billions of extra mouths, all eating oil derivatives. Think about that one for a second. We’ve recycled a limited natural resource into the project of human reproduction, for the sole sake of human reproduction. Talk about futile.
The American Century (the 20th) was a story of industrial growth, economic vitality, and a middle class expansion that the world has never seen before. But I would submit to you that every bit of that growth was directly proportional to the increased production of oil. A 1:1 ratio. Pump more oil, experience more growth. The average American currently has the equivalent of 80-100 slaves working for him or her, and that slave power is derived from ancient solar energy that was captured and stored in the ancient sea life that became our dwindling fossil fuel reserves.
Think about that. We are so oil wealthy (sort of...but that is another blog) that the average american lives like a king of old. We are so far away from the mean human existence, that a modest return to something closer to normal is likely to spell serious political and social trouble.
So what? As we pass peak (2005 is widely believed to have been the world production peak), strange things will happen in the markets. $150 a barrel oil is just a warm up. The current credit crisis is only a symptom, and a minor one at that. Less cheap oil means a falling standard of living, across the board. Period.
So, for the middle-class American (me), I would expect:
- You will never be as wealthy as you were in 2005-06. Ever. Never. Get used to it.
- Your standard of living will slowly grind down, imperceptibly at first, then at an increasingly rapid rate as time marches on. In time, food will become the most expensive item in your family budget.
- We will re-learn the following, very expensive, hard earned nugget: Real Estate is NOT an investment! A house is a depreciating asset, just like a car. It is expensive to maintain, and the taxes levied against it are significant. The over-worked printing presses of the US Treasury department have been printing cash (to buy huge quantities of foreign oil) so fast and for so long that the inflation created the illusion of wealth, and a post-war population bubble seemed to provide an endless supply of “greater fools” to bid up the prices.
- Retirement, in the standard mode of thinking, will never happen for my generation, and those that follow. We will work until the day we die.
- We will care for our parents. We will re-learn the importance of family that was lost during the cheap oil land rush that made people think Phoenix was a nice place to live.
- Our lives will become “intensely local” to quote J.H. Kuntsler. We will walk places. Like to work, to the grocery. To dinner with friends.
Sounds grim, but it doesn’t have to be. That’s why I am retired today. I am determined to enjoy what the oil orgy has to offer. Gas at $15 a gallon would make this road trip impossible. Gas at $15 will seem cheap before long... I don’t pretend to have it all worked out yet, but what I do know is that the cheap oil bubble has popped. It’s gone forever. We will soon realize that what we’ve been thinking of as normal life, was far from it.
The real world, a place where invaluable, non-renewable, highly concentrated forms of energy are as expensive as they should be.
And yes, the book is in the works... hopefully I’ll have a manuscript completed this winter!!
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