The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [137]
Figure 28.1 Food Expenditure as a Percent of Income (U.S. Data)
Source: U.S. Geological Survey.1
Because of the massive energy subsidy provided by petroleum, food expenditures have trended down to all-time lows. When that subsidy is removed, the trend will reverse. One way to combat the trend will be to keep the energy costs of food production as low as possible. That will, in many cases, involve using much less packaging and consuming food much closer to its point of origin (this means no more 1,800-mile Caesar salads).
If you don’t have it in you to become a farmer, there are thousands of young people with strong backs and even stronger work ethics who are ready, willing, and able to take on the task but lack the capital to make it happen. If you have the capital, you can facilitate farming by buying a piece of fertile land and developing an agreement with people who will work and improve that land for you as they make a living off of it. It’s a win for both parties—your land, a reliable investment, will be steadily improved over time as it’s worked in a sustainable fashion, and the tenant farmers will be able to work a more profitable piece of land than if they had taken on debt to buy their own meager parcel.
The next opportunity will be in food storage. Once upon a time, everybody had a means of storing food throughout the winter, either in root cellars or by preserving food. Clearly those features are largely missing from our current landscape and will have to be replicated somehow. While some people will opt to recreate these features for themselves in their own homes, many won’t. For those people who won’t, engaging a local business to perform the food storage tasks for them may be the preferred option. Very few of these operations currently exist; they will all have to be conceived and constructed. Think of centralized root cellars, where local crops can be stored in idealized conditions under the watchful eye of an experienced person.
People cannot escape the need to eat, and the number of opportunities in this arena are almost too numerous to count.
Energy
The big opportunities in energy will be around the areas of efficiency and relocalization. I see a prime area of opportunity in energy retrofits and green energy solutions for existing houses.
When I decided to put solar hot water panels on my house, I began with the usual online research and investigation to determine what the various options and features were. To my surprise, I found only a patchy network of web sites offering very little structured, useful information. When I turned to local installers as a potential source of information, I was quite surprised that not a single one came to my house prepared to type my requirements into a simple spreadsheet and offer a range of quotes based on the two or three key components of the system in a “good”—“better”—“best” configuration. Each quote was laboriously crafted elsewhere, and in each case, materials took several weeks on average to be produced and delivered. When the components finally arrived, they were delivered in a rental truck driven by the proprietor of the retail operation himself from a location over four hours away.
These experiences tell me that the American solar industry is ripe for improvement, and therefore with opportunity. I got the clear sense that if even 1 percent of the people in my region decided to install solar components, the local installation capacity and regional distributors would have been completely swamped and unable to meet the demand.
As energy becomes more expensive—and it will—retrofitting existing structures to make them more energy-efficient will become a very important occupation. Everything from insulating, to air sealing, to subdividing the interiors of oversized McMansions into smaller living units will go through an explosive phase of growth. Many of these retrofits can be marketed and sold as pure investments in which the improved cash flows