Life gets busy… really busy at times. You turn around, and half a year has passed by.
I haven’t posted in recent months for a few reasons. Mostly because I’ve been really busy at home and work. For all the pronouncements of immanent economic recovery, I still know more people losing their jobs than unemployed folks finding new ones. Seeing as I still have a great job, I’ve been working hard to make sure that situation stays the same.
There’s also that issue of burnout. There are plenty of great sites out there that cover similar topics, and I often felt like I was simply regurgitating and repeating what others were writing versus offering a whole lot of original thinking. Taking some time off to concentrate on other things has been good for me. The more I focused on the subjects this blog covered, the more negative I would be in other parts of my life. I’ve been able to recharge my batteries, so to speak, and it’s felt good.
In the last year I’ve been focusing more on economic issues rather than straight peak oil and sustainability. As other bloggers are noting, peak oil has changed a lot. Before, it was assumed that the increasing cost of dwindling supplies of oil would sooner or later hamstring the global economy and we’d all be screwed. As it turns out, we’ve managed to make a hash of the global economy all on our own, and as a result we’ve curtailed oil usage to a degree that has bought us some breathing room to adapt to different energy technologies as well as different patterns of daily life. The end result is still the same: lower standards of living (in both energy and economic terms) and massive debts for the common person. The difference is that there won’t be the catastrophic ‘liberal apocalypse’ that some peak oil proponents have written on endlessly for the last five years or more. Instead we’ll see more of a gradual lowering of living standards and unwinding of many components of the global infrastructure as we slowly fail to keep more and more parts of them operational.
The fact that our economy is badly hurt shouldn’t be news to anyone, so I fail to see the point in writing about that fact several times per week. If your eyes are open, it’s obvious. I have better things to do that continue to harp on this stuff, and you’ve got better stuff to do that read the same, re-hashed crap multiple times.
Two interesting posts that did catch my eye recently:
Devolution: 20 Predictions
I’ll try to post ever so often as the muse dictates. In the meantime, I sincerely hope that all of you are doing as well as you possibly can, and are making your own plans to adapt to the coming changes.
Posted by Bart 
The Moral Equivalent of War 