Well, there's no shortage of bad news lately. While mainstream media comments on the Iran War like it's a football game, more serious analysts have been raising all the red flags, and it's not pretty. This war is going to exacerbate problems already in progress, including major droughts that could result in widespread food shortages by late summer.
If we haven't felt the full brunt of gas shortages yet, it's because the Trump regime did finally open up the strategic reserve. That's blunting the price surges and keeping shortages to a minimum, but the shortages are happening and it's a matter of time before they get worse.
The panic buying has begun.
Honestly, it feels late...
But it's here.
Those of you who follow Sarah Connor have already read her analysis of what we're up against. Another analysis paints another bleak picture, and you don't have to share the author's attitude toward Bitcoin to appreciate its depth and take the warnings at face value.
I'm going to tell you in detail what my family has been doing to get ready. For starters, we've done just about everything I've described in my illustrated survival guide. Some people have asked where they can get the print version. You can order it here. But I've put the entire guide under a creative commons license, so you can just download it and have it printed and bound wherever you want. Here's the file:
A few people have dropped me a line to say how much they love this print edition. I hope everyone is feeling like it was a good investment. It covers just about everything we intended.
What else?
My family went ahead and got a professional solar installation. It's small, but I'm glad we did it. We're producing 40-50kW a day, with a modest system and a basic battery. Our house gets such good sun, it would've been stupid not to invest now. Between data centers and endless war driving energy prices to insane levels, across the board, anyone who can feasibly do any kind of install should do it now.
We started this process back in December, and it took 3-4 months before everything was finally installed and approved. Why now? I'm about halfway through my course on residential electrical systems, but it's just the basics. I'm still at least a year away from being able to install anything, and that doesn't include things like crawling around on a roof or passing an electrical inspection. My goal is to learn enough to manage and repair the system as the need arises.
The install folks mentioned something important to me: If you wait until everyone else wants a solar install on their homes, you're going to regret it. Not only will demand drive up prices, but utility companies will cap the number of homes they allow to get solar panels, either temporarily or permanently. In short, you might wind up in a queue, and nobody knows how long you'll stay there. Btw, these guys were just chatting. They weren't fearmongering. We'd already paid for the system when they came out. I told them I was studying to become an electrician, and they opened up a little more than they might've otherwise.
So...
We don't love taking on another monthly payment, but here's the thing: Our monthly solar is already less than our utility bill. Soon, it's going to be significantly less. It also turns out that our utility company wasn't accurately reporting our energy use. We use quite a bit less, something we learned when we got the real-time monitor.
What else?
We're biting the bullet and trading in our cars for one EV, the most affordable one we can find. Maybe it sounds privileged, but I don't care. It sure doesn't feel like a privilege to trade in two cars for one while taking on yet another bill, but with gas shortages and panic buying starting to set in, we feel like we've got few other choices.
Between endless wars and peak oil, we're going to need reliable transportation. We live in the suburbs, and as much as I'd love to ride a horse, I don't see it happening. When you have an EV and a solid solar charging option, you don't have to worry about stocking up on gasoline, figuring out where to store it, and all the safety hazards.
Bicycles are a great last resort, and we might be using them in 15 years. In the meantime, we can't ride a bike to pick up our daughter from her outdoor nature school. We can't ride a bike to our families to help our aging parents when they have emergencies.
And that's already starting to happen...
So, EV it is.
On the water front, solar panels enable us to run our atmospheric water generator wide open. The guide covers this as well. You simply can't rely on rain if droughts are your main threat. A water generator pulls water from the air. The science of a drought: It's not that there isn't any water, it's that the water is trapped in the warmer air. So if you can run a water generator, you have drinking water.
You can also harvest dew, as covered in the guide.
You won't be watering a garden with either of those methods, but they'll keep you alive. They'll also help you reserve your rainwater or stored water for other purposes.
Some preppers roll their eyes at water generators and call them glorified dehumidifiers. Well, water generators produce filtered, drinkable water. Dehumidifiers don't. We tested ours. It works. It's safe. It just uses a lot of power. With solar, it's no longer a huge concern.
We've spent the last few years learning how to grow some food. We got our garden planted for this season. If we need to extend our growing into fall and winter, we can do it now. We know what can handle cold temperatures and what can't. (Also covered in the guide.)
After diving through edible weeds and medicinal herbs, we have a good handle on what to do if we get sick.
We also know that in a worst case scenario, like a famine, we can go around and look for kudzu. We can cut some and throw it in a garden, and we can let our neighbors bitch about it. Although if things get bad enough, I suspect they'll have other things on their mind. How many people know you can just eat kudzu, and it actually covers a large portion of your dietary needs? It's a nice failsafe.
If the kudzu option fails, we are truly screwed.
As I make plans for the second edition of the guide, I'm feeling good about the overall strategy. The first edition covers all the things most of us can start doing right now. My plan intentionally left some of the bigger items for later. Honestly, who among us is going to be building log cabins and mud huts within the next year?
I've been digging into some of these topics. While I plan to cover them for the sake of being comprehensive, we have to accept some limits. If things get as bad as fast as some of the analysts predict regarding this war, we aren't going to be building earthship homes. We're going to be hunkering down with what we've got, where we are.
A couple of weeks ago, I gathered up a handful of homebuilding manuals from the 19th century, thinking they could inform my guide. I was wrong. Reading them, it struck me just how much the world has changed. We're heading into the 2030s, almost two hundred years after the original homesteaders. I'm thinking, where on earth am I going to build a log cabin? Where am I going to get the timber?
What's the point?
So, I've been actively revising what I think the second edition of the guide should cover in light of this war. It changes things. It means a future that's less frontier survival, less bushcraft, and much more along the lines of scavenging and salvaging our way through this mess. We're not going to be homesteaders.
We're going to be landfill vultures.
It's going to be a weird mashup of technologies from different eras, deployed in suburban homes retrofitted as homesteads, with everyone just doing the best they can with scraps. We're going to be using solar, and we're going to be turning to whatever alternative fuel sources we can as conventional gasoline becomes ever rarer.
I think that's going to be the theme of the second edition:
Workarounds. Alternatives.
Scraps.
