Build Underground

Mother Earth makes the best natural insulator, and environmentalists searching for ways to escape the greenhouse effect have found the answer in her.

Why not build underground? The earth is extremely energy-efficient, it provides perfect insulation for the creation of eco-friendly, low impact accommodation.

The first earth-sheltered housing was built on the West Yorkshire moors in the late 70s by the architect Arthur Quarmby and attracted a lot of media interest.

The are several subterranean homes in Cornwall. Simon Omerod of Wadebridge set out to design a house that didn’t need mains gas or electricity back in 1994. He had a five year battle with local planners to get permission for his earth sheltered dwelling, but finally got all the right paperwork.

Costs in comparison to conventional house vary by plus or minus 10%. This low impact method of building can blend perfectly with the landscape. It is extremely energy-efficient, and requires very little maintenance, no gutters to clean, etc. The earth covering gives excellent sound insulation and the whole building is well protected from the elements.

On the down side, these buildings can be more expensive to construct, could be difficult to sell on, and planning permission and mortgages can be difficult to obtain.

For more information and advice contact The British Earth Sheltering Association on 01993 703619.

The European Gas Grab

I've been keeping a fairly close eye on the UK's gas storage levels of late. With the recent cold weather and Russia cutting of it's supply of gas to the EU, it seemed inevitable that our gas stocks would begin to decline.

What I didn't anticipate is just how quickly our stocks would dwindle.

I hadn't planned to publish this data until after the weekend, but after reading this morning's edition of the excellent UK Tabloid and being presented with this news article.

EU WILL GRAB BRITAIN'S GAS

BRITAIN’S vital North Sea oil and gas supplies are to be taken over by Europe under emergency plans revealed for the first time in Brussels yesterday.

EU leaders are demanding control of British energy reserves to prevent power blackouts that have left millions of eastern Europeans without heat in Arctic weather due to the Russian gas blockade.

Euro-MPs are calling for the creation of a European gas reserve, made up of British and Dutch supplies, which member states can tap into in the event of any future shortage.

The transfer of ownership would be enacted under secret powers written into the controversial Lisbon Treaty. It gives Europe the legal power to take over individual states’ supplies to “ensure security of energy supply in the Union”.

Ultimate control over Britain’s vast natural gas and oil fields – by far the biggest resource within the EU – will fall to Brussels if the new treaty, which has already been ratified by Britain, is adopted throughout Europe.

Full Story

Back to the data ....

According to operation data available on the National Grid's web site's, long range storage levels are roughly the same as this time last year, but both medium range and short range storage levels have plummeted in the last few days.

We already export gas to Belgium and those exports are contributing to the decline in our gas stocks. Imagine the impact of having to export a volume of gas 10, 20 or 30 times greater. Our Country would be thrown into chaos, energy production would plummet, industries would collapse, the most vulnerable in Our Society would perish.

Will Gordon Brown allow this to happen?

He has already signed the Lisbon Treaty and betrayed every single man, woman and child in this country and he will be held accountable for suffering caused, by his actions, to Our People.

The question is not whether Gordon Brown will allow this to happen, he already has. The question is, will YOU reverse what he has done? The gas that Our Country produces does not belong to Gordon Brown and it does not belong to the EU ....it belongs to YOU, the British People and provides you and your loved ones with light and with warmth.

You can reverse this.

You can leave the European Union.

You can vote for the British National Party at each and every election; local, national and European.

Don't waste your vote, it's the only way you have left to decide your own future. Join us and help return Our Country to it's people.

by Man of the Woods

Future Water Crisis in the UK

BRITAIN faces a water supply crisis with almost half the population living in areas that are now more parched than Egypt or Morocco.

Some 24.1million people live in “water stressed” regions where there is a risk of drought.

The “parched zone” stretches from Kent to the Humber estuary and as far west as Cornwall and Mid-Wales.

These homes have less water available per head than parts of North Africa and the Middle East.

An Environment Agency report warns that Britain’s growing population and climate change is putting huge pressure on water supplies.

It studied data on the supply and demand for 21 water companies in England and Wales.

It warns that supplies are so dire that tougher measures, such as a huge increase in the number of water meters fitted to homes, are needed to force people to cut consumption.

Other water industry experts have already warned that standpipes could become common across large areas of Britain.

“Water stressed” areas are those where the population uses more than 20 per cent of the rain water left over to refill rivers, lakes and aquifers. A spokesman for the Environment Agency said: “There’s a lot of pressure on water supplies in this country.

“If you have an average year you are fine. But with climate change, you might have too much rain one year and then a drought, like we had in 2005 to 2006.

“This could cause real problems in the future. And no one knows exactly what the impact of climate change will be.”

The Government target for daily water consumption per person is 130 litres, but the average Briton consumes 148 litres, and as much as 170 litres in the South-east.

Measures proposed include allowing water companies to earn greater profits if they manage to persuade customers to use less water by, for example, installing more meters.

The agency also says that more should be done to tackle leaks which last year amounted to 3,291 megalitres of water every day – enough to fill Wembley Stadium three times in 24 hours. But it says that building more reservoirs and desalination plants to make seawater drinkable is not the solution.

The spokesman said: “Although it might be quite useful to have a desalination plant next to the sea in case there’s a drought, it’s not really the way forward.

“It’s about reducing demand, not increasing supply.”

In the spring the agency will publish a water resource strategy which will set out plans to cope with a potential shortage over the next 20 or 30 years.

Peak Oil - Explained

We are entering the Peak Oil era. The growth of oil production is slowing, driving up oil and gasoline gas prices, firing inflation, driving unemployment, straining our global economy, and threatening to collapse our entire system. We are reaching Peak Oil and we are unprepared. Teacher Aaron Wissner, in a compact 10 minutes video summary, details Peak Oil, the evidence, the impacts, and the solutions. See the full one-hour video at LocalFuture.org

Peak Oil, The Politics

If peak oil is an issue surely it is best left for the energy experts to resolve and the BNP can concentrate on more immediate matters?

Such a question is commonly heard at branch meetings and read in emails and letters sent into the web team and other office holders.

In response we need to be clear about some basic issues. The BNP is not going to achieve political power in Westminster or elsewhere, beyond perhaps a few town or district councils in the next 10-15 years.

The current corrupt system will not allow the BNP to win anything more than a token presence in councils and perhaps one or two other elected chambers around the country.

However the corrupt system is not going to manage to silence the growing number of Britons who are rightly concerned, fed up and disillusioned by the betrayal of our economy, our communities, our culture and our way of life.

That disillusionment sometimes turns to anger as we saw in the hauliers dispute back in 2000. With petrol prices due to rise yet again, and politicians working behind the scenes to stop the cost going over the psychological £4 a gallon mark, there will be much more manifestations of disillusionment and anger in the years to come.

It will not just be hauliers and farmers, but legions of others; employees who are on short working weeks, self-employed tradesmen finding it hard to pay for their fuel, the mums who cannot get a doctor to call on their sick children, the young couples facing repossession of their houses because the cost of living is spiraling out of control.

As oil prices rise, it will be millions who suffer, millions of ordinary people who are just trying to get on with their lives, millions of ordinary decent people will be forced into states of anxiety, depression, fear and anger.

The BNP is making peak oil a high profile issue for a number of reasons.

1. The press have portrayed the BNP membership as knuckle draggers, poorly educated, unsuccessful losers who blame minority groups such as blacks/asians/gays/communists (delete as appropriate) for their situation.

The fact that our current Chairman, Nick Griffin received a degree from Cambridge University and that more than two-thirds of the Advisory Council have university degrees seems to have missed the assorted hacks, editors and broadcasters who rail against us. We are a party of clever, resourceful and deeply motivated and committed individuals.

We have to work harder than our political opponents to convey the reality that the BNP is made up of thoroughly decent Britons who have a great deal of combined grey matter, are highly resourceful, successful people in their own lives and that we can be trusted to generate some stunning policy ideas to regenerate this country and demonstrate responsible leadership on this and other issues.

2. We are the only political party making this an issue at the moment. We are leaders in this issue just as we have been the ones leading the debate on immigration and asylum.

It is because the BNP exists and because the BNP has been seen to win votes from Labour because of our tough stand on immigration and asylum that Labour are now trying to be seen to be tough on asylum, even to the extent this month of ensuring the high profile deportations of distressed asylum seekers back to the murderous hands of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.

When we were talking about immigration, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago we were ignored, pilloried and condemned. We still are polloried and condemned but not ignored. Immigration is high on the list of voters’ concerns and the other parties are now playing “catch up” to the BNP.

3. We are not a single-issue party. While immigration and asylum are important issues, we have no desire to be seen only as the “anti-immigration” pressure group. The BNP has a serious mission to undertake - we have to secure political power in this country within the next 40 years otherwise there will not be a Britain.

We must have policies that will work, policies that will cover every aspect of human activity and the complex society that we will be running. We need to find, recruit, train and assist spokesmen and women to develop, to refine and to disseminate these policies on health, education, energy, transport, governance, law and order as well as immigration, Europe, and defence.

4. When the BNP does win political power Peak Oil will not be something that we can postpone. It will be happening at the very time that we come to power. In fact it may well be an important catalyst that helps us to win political power because we are the ones talking about it now, the voters might not like us pointing out that the wolf is approaching the chicken coop but they will identify us as the ones who kept speaking about it back in 2005, bringing it to their awareness and understanding.

Voters take to new ideas, even radically new ideas when the system that they have trusted, worked with, admired and felt comfortable with falls apart. We are going to make a lot of noise about Peak Oil because it is yet another example of how the current political process has failed the people of this country, how the short-sightedness of most of our corrupt, incompetent and downright traitorous politicians is very shortly going to create one awful mess and we rightly identify those individuals, those systems, those institutions that have been responsible for that collapse.

Peak Oil, The Worst Possible Scenario

It is the worst case scenario anyone can possibly imagine.

The extraction and processing of the finite fuels, oil and gas, are at the root of our industrialised and technological advanced society. Take the cheap oil and gas away and everything that is built on the availability of cheap, unlimited fuel collapses.

Our complex, highly structured, regimented society depends ever more on the use of technology on complex logistics to ship goods around the world to meet consumer demands. Take away the power for that new technology and the world falls apart.

What can we expect when we can no longer afford oil, when we can no longer run natural gas burning power stations, when the wheels of the UK economy literally grind to a halt.

Stranded
90% of all today’s transportation systems depend on oil. There is no other commodity which could replace oil (in the form of petrol or diesel) as a fuel to drive the millions of cars, freight vehicles and trains on Britain’s roads and railtracks. In fact the very roads themselves actually come from oil. 26 million tonnes of asphalt were produced in the UK in 1998 for use on British roads.

Asphalt is not employed to make all road surfaces look dark grey but has been widely adopted as it is easily laid and rolled to give a smooth surface, enables easy drainage/run off, minimising skid risks, acts as a noise dampener and allows for coloured paints to be applied as road markings. No oil - no asphalt; no asphalt - no smooth water-proof road surfaces.

Perhaps more importantly aviation cannot be fuelled by any other source. Given the time and the money electric trains could replace all the diesel fleet of trains, given the time and money electric trams could replace conventional diesel driven buses, but no commercial aeroplane can possibly be run on any alternative fuel.

So as oil becomes more expensive, budget airlines will cease to exist. Those two foreign holidays so many Britons consider as their “right” will become much more expensive.

Shipping all that food, all those electronic consumer goods from Korea and Taiwan, those cheap T-shirts and toys from China depends on oil. While shipping is far less energy consuming than aviation, those giant container ships are diesel and fuel oil guzzlers.

Without a cheap supply of diesel and marine fuel oil Johnny doesn’t get his latest animated piece of plastic at Christmas but then millions of food aid recipients in the Third World will literally go without their daily bread and butter.

How will you get to work? In fact will you have a job to get to? What happens when there is a fire in your home, office, factory? Will the local authority have the money to put fuel in the tanks of the fire tenders, will the health board have the money to pay the exorbitant cost of what small amount of diesel or unleaded to fill up the tanks of the ambulances, the GP’s cars and the motorbikes of the paramedics? Will the police arrive in time to catch the burglars who have broken into your house while you were asleep? It is not like the “old days” when a patrol car could be dispatched but in a world where a gallon of petrol costs more than a weekly wage, the constables have a fair distance to walk or cycle from the station.

Famine
Every nation on the planet benefits from the advances made in dramatically boosting crop yields. Wheat and barley harvests in East Anglia are now nearly double what they were 50 years ago. Western nations have a food surplus which are used to either trade with other nations or given away to the starving of Africa, parts of Asia and Latin America.

While some increase in crop yield can be attributed to selective breeding and fluctuations in climate, most of the increase in crop yield has arisen from the use of oil! Oil is not of course used directly on crops but pesticides are and many pesticides are derived from the processing of crude oil. Those pesticides are sprayed from booms attached to tractors and tractors use diesel which comes from the processing of crude oil.

The other major input in the crop production process is artificial fertiliser. This is made from ammonia which in turn comes from petroleum or natural gas. This artificial fertiliser is applied to Britain’s fields using the same diesel burning tractors mentioned above.

The bags of fertiliser and the chemical drums of pesticides are likely to be made of plastic and again plastic packaging needs oil.

The UK remains one of the leading chemical producing countries and exports millions of tonnes of both fertiliser and pesticide around the world - aboard diesel driven ships!

Away from the farm, the contents of the typical British/American/Western European larder are likely to have been harvested, distributed, processed, packaged and redistributed through supply chains of wholesalers, supermarkets and delivered to one’s nearest retailer by gas guzzling vans, artics or train.

Keeping those perishable items chilled requires expensive refrigeration. Refrigeration units are energy demanding pieces of kit and depend upon oil or gas to generate the electricity to power them. What’s more the source of the refrigerant; the chemical mixture that is pumped around and around the coils in the refrigeration kit, is also derived from either oil or gas.

Without oil there would be considerably less inorganic fertiliser production, almost no pesticide production and a radical change in the distribution of those types of fertiliser and pesticide that are not dependent on crude oil. It means an end to cheap processed foods, an end to apples being shipped in from Chile and South Africa during a British winter, an end to Egyptian strawberries being available for Christmas desserts.

More significantly it means a drop in crop yields, which will lead to higher food prices in the west and less food aid to donate to the Third World.

Poor

The world’s wealth in the 20th century and opening years of the 21st century has been created by debt. A business with a good idea and which could show growth would seek a loan from a bank. That the bank never had the cash to lend to the customer but merely extended credit to the customer is not the point. The customer could get the credit needed to buy the equipment, rent the factiry unit, pay his wages and as long as his sales grew he was happy, the banks were happy, the staff were happy and his own customers were happy.

But when growth stops and show no signs of recovering, the banks pull the credit, the customer cannot pay his suppliers, pay his rent, pay his wages and his business suffers. A simplistic overview but it does show that in modern economics growth is needed for businesses to survive. It should not have to be like that. After all we can all think of the self-employed window cleaner who does say 20 houses a day at £5 a time and takes £100 in cash a day.

He cannot grow, he might have to work the extra hour or take someone else on to assist but he makes a reasonable living from doing what he does. That is human scale economics. The same applies to most self-employed people, small businesses and others who do not need to resort to the banks for credit. The big businesses need growth to satisfy firstly the big banks and secondly the other element in this the instituional investors, speculators, pension funds and insurance funds.

War

President Bush lies when he says he has sent teenage recruits from Iowa and Idaho to Iraq in order to create a safe democratic country now devoid of the tyranny of Dictator Saddam Hussein. Bush is not planning a war with Iran just so that the home of the once great Persian Empire will embrace American style democracy.

Bush’s Troops do not continue to occupy Afghanistan just so the people there can grow opium poppies without being troubled by the Taliban. These three countries are key players in the oil based geo-political landscape.

“We now have the second largest oil reserves in the world, after Saudi Arabia,” Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh announced last July (2004).

He said that discoveries in the country’s south western deserts showed the Islamic Republic sitting on 132 billion barrels of proven reserves, a jump of 17 billion barrels.

BP puts Iraq in 3rd place for proven crude reserves with 115 billion barrels.

America is currently blackmailing nations to support its continued occupation of Iraq. Non American troops are being dispatched to the troubled region in exchange for oil deals.

Afghanistan has very little oil, it has some gas worth having but its great wealth lies in its strategic position, capable of carrying a much debated pipeline from central Asia to the Indian Ocean via Pakistan. America’s foreign policy does seem to indicate that the Whitehouse knows fine well about “Peak Oil” and that American troops are being deployed to safeguard the world’s oilfields.

China’s current demand of 7 million barrels of crude a day, rising to 8 million barrels a day by the end of the decade is likely to spark off hostilities with competitive countries, principally America. Tensions are rising in Nigeria and noises are coming from the Oval Office about fighting the war on terrorism in the region.

Strange is it not that the places where “terrorism” abounds are precisely those places which have bountiful amounts of crude! Perhaps Uncle Sam will descend on Africa’s largest oilfields to protect the Nigerian infrastructure from “terrorism”. America is facing a sustained backlash from angry Muslims in Iraq.

It will likewise face the same challenge in the more populous Iran and if it tries to take on the emerging superpower of China the backlash might lead to full scale military activity.

When the smaller poorer nations of the world cannot get their hands on the black stuff to help feed, clothe, transport and employ their own burgeoning populations are they going to wait for aid to come, wait for outside assistance and hope the price of crude falls once more, are they going to remain quiet and just on with things or are they going to fight their neighbours to seize whatever energy resources it can?

Pestilence

We quite rightly place great pride in the advances in medical science in the past 50 years. The risk of catching a deadly disease in a dirty hospital aside, which is more a political issue than a health issue, in the UK we have greater longevity, are less likely to succumb to the diseases that plagued our grandparents and can rely on our medical services to rescue us, treat us and give us all the medicines money can buy to prolong our active lives.

How do you keep the donor organs at the right temperature? How do you power the magnetic scanners which are used to detect tumours, keep an eye on growing babes in the womb?

And what of those petrochemically derived pills and medicines, the analgesics, antihistamines, antibiotics, antibacterials, sedatives, tranquillisers and those plastics in all disposables used for maintaining sterile conditions; specialised plastics used in heart valves; common items such as isopropanol (rubbing alcohol); polyethylene and poly-vinyl acetate used in tubing, sheeting, splints, prostheses, blood bags, disposable syringes and catheters?

We take our water supplies for granted. Fresh clean potable water comes out of the tap whenever we ask for it. An awful lot of oil went into getting that water to the tap. Reservoirs need to be maintained, pumps need electricity, the water treatment works need a lot of electricity, to get the water in the first place needs concrete pipes, concrete is manfacutred using a lot of oil.

The pipes have to be delivered by truck to the building sites, the trenches are dug using oil fuelled diggers and so it goes on. Water isn’t just for drinking. It is used to flush the loos in milions of homes, offices, schools and hospitals.

Unflushed human waste is pretty unpleasant, not just the stench. Can you imagine the huge potential for the spread of some pretty nasty diseases; there is going to be a big demand for treatment of cholera, dysentry, gastro-enteritis, hepatitis.

Oh and the rats…with crumbling sewers and a lack of “fresh” human waste passing through the sewers yes the rats will have a wonderful time as the emerge from the sewers looking for the titbits that keep them breeding. Rats carry Weil’s disease which gives rise to flu like symptoms and leads to heart failure if not treated.

It wasn’t the rats that caused the outbreaks of bubonic plague in the middle ages, it was the fleas that the rats carried, but when you are dying in agony as the lymph nodes in your neck, armpits and groin have swollen to the size of a walnut you will not be too interested in the method of carrying the disease! A good strong cat might be a useful pet and possible life-saver!

Without oil we all go back to a time of greater hardships; uncontainable epidemics, hospitals which cannot be heated or air conditioned, no rescue helicopters or airlifts, no mass produced vaccines or painkillers. Death comes closer to those without oil. How are we going to cope?

Vulnerable

The entire complex centralised societies of the west are wholly dependent on cheap fuel. Those surveillance cameras on every High Street, inside every rail station and public building are there to help deter criminals, make commuters and everyday shoppers feel safe and in the worst case scenario, if someone is attacked, mugged or murdered then well there is the camera footage to help identify the culprit and provide evidence in any trial.

A database of fingerprint images and DNA samples of hundreds of thousands of criminals exists, easily accessible by any authorised police officer. Well perhaps….

Apart from the token bobby pounding the beat (in pairs of course…21st century society is far too dangerous for a lone police officer to go out on patrol) those police cars - from the humble patrol Astra to the gas guzzling Range Rovers, the favoured vehicle of traffic cops, they need oil and lots of it.

Starve a constabulary of petrol and diesel and how are the officers going to deal with the local teenage louts…..the corporate fraudsters…the drug barons whose fortunes will increase as society falls apart and the weak, lonely, the redundant, the business failures and atomised seek solace in bootleg alcohol and whatever mind numbing substances they can lay their hands on?

Of course there is always the Army, but an army these days drives rather than marches, can a few score thousand professional soldiers keep the peace on British streets?

A mass attempt by the populace to storm a food distribution depot close to the M62 might be dealt with by a few hundred armed infantrymen, but if the scene is multiplied across two hundred depots in twenty counties and a further hundred High Streets and a score of coastal ports as desperate, genuinely desperate fathers, older brothers and husbands try and grab whatever food, medicines, drugs, alcohol for their crying, malnourished offspring siblings and family members.

What if the working class storming the food distribution depots are the brothers, sisters, cousins of the twenty-something infantrymen armed with SA80s? Will the well trained British squaddie really fire on his neighbours, friends and family?

The cities will be dangerous places, conventional policing will be unable to contain the armed gangs who will control “their” areas. The wealthy can try and hide behind armoured gates and security systems, can establish their own armed gangs or buy protection from an armed gang. What of the rest of society? Even in today’s oil booming consumerist society there are no go areas for unarmed police officers, housing schemes who are in thrall to the local “Mr. Big” often a pimp, a drug dealer and fence.

If the police are not there to help, just who is going to look after the law abiding residents? Do we take the law into our own hands or do we all become easy prey to the armed gangs of pimps, drug barons and organised crime rings?

The nights will of course be darker, the local councils will not be able to afford the cost of electricity to power street lamps. The nights will be quieter too, as millions of exhausts are silenced, lying rusting in driveways and gardens across the country. Fewer people will frequent the city centres, those that do risk assault, attack and even murder. Living in a city is a real health hazard in a world without oil.

Conclusion

A darker, hunger filled, more dangerous existence. That is one possible view of life after oil, but does it really have to be this bad? Could there be some upside, some silver lining on this particularly gloomy looking cloud?

It might be apocalyptic but it might just be a time of opportunity for those that are aware, those that are prepared and those that can adapt. Don’t have nightmares and see for yourself just what opportunities might open up.

The Outcomes of the Oil Crisis

We are faced with a situation in less than a decade, of rising oil prices which will rise so high that many of us will be forced to abandon our petrol and diesel fuelled vehicles.

Transportation of all goods and freight will be effected. The cost of everything from groceries to imported clothes and toys and medicines will be higher, in some cases prohibitively so.

Electricity generation will likewise be effected as natural gas becomes an expensive and unattractive fuel for electricity consumption. Some aspects of the lives of all of us are going to change.

It might be a time of apocalyptic events but if there is enough awareness of the issue, certain preparations made and a psychological adjustment to a world without oil, then such a change in world events may be a time for tremendous opportunities. These are just some of the situations which might arise and which present themselves as new opportunities.

Travel and transport

It will be travel and transport that see the biggest likely upheavals. Oil accounts for 90% of UK transport, the remaining 10% is accounted for by electric trains, trams and underground trains.

A daily commuting trip of 100 miles will be prohibitively expensive, even filling up a car for a cross city trip of 5-6 miles will no longer be cost effective. Things will change.

Commuters will initially be inclined towards greater use of public transport but as even the cost of using trains and buses starts to rise then individuals will be forced to make key life changing decisions. Working from home or working closer to home will be options. Walking or cycling to work with the knock on health benefits of keeping fit may be appropriate for some. There is much talk of fuel cells replacing petrol driven engines.

Centralised society

A society which feeds information and power down from the top is an energy intensive arrangement. It requires a large bureaucracy, huge databases and all the technology that is needed to keep those databases up to date. It requires efficient communication between executive, legislative and judicial branches.

It requires streamlining and standardising everything from police procedures to the national curriculum. Remove the energy powering these complex centralised behemoths and they cease to function just as flicking the power switch on a computer stops it working.

Power is returned to the end user, the consumer and the citizen. Town councils which throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries ran efficient and effective administrations with considerably less influence from Westminster and Whitehall will be the decision making bodies of the future.

Wider still, a centralised Euro empire with its hub in Brussels will never be able to function. The bigger the empire, the greater the infrastructure, the greater the usage of energy to maintain that infrastructure.

The project to enslave all sovereign peoples of Europe in a Soviet style European Union will never come to fruition. The peak oil crisis will be welcomed by all patriotic people of Europe and decision making will be repatriated to the lowest appropriate level

Environment

One thing is for sure, the countryside, the wildlife and human health should benefit enormously from an oil crisis. Most of the UK’s 31 million vehicles will not be going anywhere. As the price of crude rises, pump prices will follow suit, pricing all but the very wealthy or very determined or very criminal off the roads. There will be no need for new motorways, no new town by-passes, saving for prosperity our native woodlands, meadows, heaths and downland.

Agri-businesses will not be spreading artificial fertiliser on our farms, nor will they be applying pesticides. Water courses will be improved and all manner of flora and fauna will once again thrive. Endangered species of butterfly, newts, orchids and birds will have a reprieve following years of decline, a consequence of industrialised farming which has destroyed habitats, killed with pesticides and fouled the waterways. Human health will benefit as well.

Health

People will still die, suffer from ailments and contagious illnesses and even if energy demanding organ transplants may not be possible, overall human health should improve. Those diseases and conditions that have resulted from decades of conspicuous consumption will become a thing of the past.

Obesity resulting from the mass consumption of junk food and factory processed food will yield to healthier eating habits and more exercise as consumers walk and cycle rather than depend on cars.

Cancer has been seen as a scourge of modern living. Those chemicals which have given us fizzy drinks in plastic bottles, banana flavoured milk shakes without ever have been within a mile of a real banana, barbeque flavours and provided industry with lubricants, catalysts and feedstocks for the past 60 years have left their legacy in the food chain and the environment.

Post-oil more people will know exactly what they are eating. They will either be growing food themselves in their gardens, allotments or they will see the market gardener, the orchard grower, and the pig farmer tending to their crops and animals. They will be buying from a butcher or a greengrocer who has seen the items from farmgate to shop shelf.

They will once again be involved in the natural cycle of planting and harvesting, birth, maturity and death. Without pesticides and artificial fertiliser, all food will be by default “organic” putting an end to the duality of food marketing. Organic food will quite rightly be available to all on a level economic playing field unlike the current situation where foods labelled as organic are paradoxically more costly than non-organic foodstuff.

Stress- the modern psychological condition resulting from overwork, commuting, dealing with deadlines and never ending demands for improvement will give way to a slower pace of life, a lifestyle more in keeping with the human mind and human time scale.

Family life

Post-oil means post mass production of processed foods. Someone, male or female will need to cook a family meal. Instant microwave TV dinners will give way to properly prepared and cooked meals mostly using ingredients locally grown and harvested with the minimal of processing.

Dinner will be a family experience, just as it was throughout our nation’s history before the advent of cheap oil. Sitting around the evening dinner families will be doing what families have always done since Man began to use fire to cook the kill.

Instead of being dependent on a centralised State bureaucracy and a Nanny State parents will take more interest in bringing up their own children and children might be inclined to take more care of their elderly parents and grandparents.

Without the same degree of reliance on complex health and rescue services individuals will assume self-responsibility for their own actions. The extended family will once again assume its place as the foundations and building bricks of a healthy functioning society.

The new economy

Big financial institutions will try and keep a lid on things but the cycle of economic growth fuelled by debt will come to a crashing devastating halt. The fall out will be of world shattering consequences but change will make available new opportunities and human needs will necessitate new forms of economic activity.

The Danes are well in the lead with their wind technology and a radical approach to ownership has been adopted. The first turbines were erected by guilds or co-operatives, which required member-owners to live within 3 kilometres of the site. The guilds eventually organized as the Danish Wind Turbine Owners Association, which became a powerful political force.

Today, 100,000 Danish families own wind turbines or shares in wind co-operatives. Although the rules have been relaxed following pressure from the big utility companies a stakeholder in a wind turbine or wind farm is allow ownership of up to 30,000 kWh per year by any person who lives or works in the borough or who owns a house or other property there.

If Denmark can lead the way with wind farms then there is no logical reason for such co-operative enterprises to exist in other areas of activity; food production, manufacturer of bicycles, printing presses, house building, craft workshops and countless other goods and services.

Small businesses benefit

People will still need to eat, drink, clothe themselves, fill their homes with both the essentials and the nice things that make a house a home. People will still need attend to their personal hygiene and amuse themselves when not working. But the things that people will buy will need to be sourced, manufactured and sold locally.

Mass transportation of Chinese made cotton T-shirts will not be possible. In fact unless we return to using sail or steam (coal driven) ships, cotton from the US, Egypt, India will not reach Albion’s shores, so alternatives will be needed.

Massive new business opportunities will exist for small enterprises, individually owned, family run and co-operative ventures. Mass production will be unfeasible and businesses will source primary raw materials locally, turn those materials into finished products locally, sell locally and employ local people.

A massive renaissance of traditional crafts and cottage industries may take place. Wood turners, leather workers, blacksmiths and stone workers may be struggling to keep up with demand. A restructuring of the education system will be necessary to provide training in new skills and old crafts as demand for graduates in sociology, media studies and peace studies will be even more unemployable than they are now.

Differences

Because mass transport of goods will not be possible and because local raw materials will be sought for various activities, there will be an end towards the trend of standardisation.

Recent news stories bemoaned look-a-like Britain. Market towns from Falkirk to Exeter have town centres that are virtually indistinguishable from one another. 10 years post-oil, we will see the end of the dominance of High Street chains; goodbye to the golden arches of McDonalds, goodbye to Gap, so long to Starbucks and cheerio to Comet and Currys.

Houses will be built using materials locally sourced. Bricks and mortar will not longer be appropriate or possible in all of these islands. East Anglian houses may see brick walls with Norfolk reed thatch while while Welsh builders opt for slate roofs and stone walls.

No new skyscrapers and towering office blocks will be built. Everything will be conducted at a more human level and in a more human time scale. Because flying will be next to impossible people seeking to recharge their proverbial batteries will look to holiday closer to home. Parks will be seen as valued places of retreat, even if only for a few hours; their pavillions and monuments restored and plots carefully tendered.

Global warming stops.

If global warming is caused directly by the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which has been generated by the burning of fossil fuels, and there are strong arguments which assign the blame to carbon dioxide and equally strong arguments which disprove this conclusion then the release of carbon dioxide by burning oil and gas will reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as renewable alternatives are sought and used.

It may be too late to undo the damage which some have attributed to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over the past few decades, but the process will be brought to a halt. As more land around the planet gradually returns to natural vegetation over a period of centuries the carbon dioxide levels will return to a pre-oil boom level.

Readers of this page will not reap the benefits but our great great grandchildren probably will.

Conclusion

Change is inevitable but one person’s apocalyptic view of the same situation could be interpreted as an opportunity by another. Britons are resourceful, innovative and can be pretty bloody minded in a crisis. We can knuckle down, roll up our sleeves and get on with life even without all the labour saving devices, the shopping malls and the twice year trips to the Med or Florida.