J asks: “Hi Kim, I I just read a book call Long Emergency about peak oil. How serious is this really? The book predict that our economy which is base on cheap oil will collapse when the oil runs out in 10-20 years.  Are you making preparations for this crisis?”

J, that a great question! But, it seems to me that the bigger problems we’re having may be climate change and a diminishing supply of clean water, since basically oil is a fuel and there are fuel alternatives we can use in their place that are cleaner and also renewable. I do think our economy and lifestyles will dramatically change in the future, because now so much of our lives revolve around consumerism and extravagant consumption, and we’re damaging the earth too much by living this way.

If we stop amassing money to make purchases, making the purchases, thinking about what we’re going to purchase next, thinking about how to “manage” our money and assets, thinking about how to acquire more items and assets than the next guy and managing pollution and other problems related to the discharge of chemicals we use and produce and the absurd amount of items we discard: that will leave huge chunks of time open in our lives, and we haven’t thought a lot about how we would fill those open spaces with something better.

I put “manage” in parentheses because, of course, we don’t manage our money: we hand it over to the finance and insurance industries. When our investments profit, the companies in those industries profit too, and they use their profits to buy up land and the essential processes and commodities citizens need to run our societies – like the transportation and energy industries, and  food production. Having these cards in their pockets makes it easy for these giants to dictate where and how well we live, and it makes it pretty easy for them to exploit the earth and natural resources which really, belong to everyone – or should.