Advance Depletion and Peak Tactical Responses

So consumers are told that petrol or gas prices are going up on a certain future date. What happens? There's a rush to fill up before the deadline, which simply pushes up demand even more. This is happening in many areas. One is the buying of airplane tickets well in advance of the actual trip. The result is we are starting to fall into a maelstrom of advance depletion, meaning that you create a bigger and bigger vortex of demand, and a bigger lag between actual prices and 'market' prices. Increasingly, with the instruments at our disposal, market money is increasingly 'fictional finance'. Credit cards are a culprit. So are mortgages based on appreciating house prices.

No one is thinking about changing their habits. Everyone is forcing, squeezing as much as they can get. This crazy behaviour is going to be punished severely when even those limits are reached (when our collective credit is exhausted).

If you are a smoker with cancer, you don't find cigarettes with less tar to smoke. Sure it has some impact, but the end result is the same. The intelligent approach is to abandon the behaviour completely - not easy - and take up something new and affirming, like marathon running. It's not an easy road.

In the same way, the Peak Oil reality we're in prescribes an about turn in our habits and lifestyles. We can't continue to invest in suburbia, in Hypermarkets, in any sort of long distance, long haul operation. We do need to invest in walkable communities, and local farming. We've got to stop focussing on long distance shipping, and be more regionally oriented.

It is becoming increasingly clear that we are going to have a very hard landing. Crash. Overshoot. But some communities can begin to immunise themselves against the coming quake. Some can even profit from it. Buy shares in SASOL now (in advance of the US driving season) or in October/November (in advance of the US winter). Oil prices have a direct impact on SASOL's value. Also look into coal, platinum and palladium stocks. Do things now while there is still some stability and resources available to re-eingineer (finances, living arrangements, transport), to some extent, what we are doing and how we are doing what we are doing.
Our government needs to be investing in railways right now.
Our electricity problem may be a blessing in disguise; an advance message. I think the opposite is true. We had the advance message 10 years ago. We failed to prepare. Expect flickering lights for the foreseeable future, and then increasing regions and areas that will have no power - cut off indefinitely or for longer and longer periods of time.

We are headed towards a future of shortages. Not enough food, not enough fuel, simply not enough for everyone. This will manifest in terms of both prices not all can afford, and actual shortages.

If you have a friend who is a farmer, build on that relationship. If you have credit cards, take out a loan, pay them off with the loan, snip them into little pieces, and be part of the solution, even if a microscopic part in a macro problem.