Yes, that's what the Nearings (Helen and Scott) did first in Vermont staring in the early 1930's at Forest Farm (for 20 years) in the Green Mountains and then on coastal Maine which occurred after the book was published.

Nate, also know that Scott Nearing wrote about war and oil way back when WWI and WWII were closely linked to petroleum, even though folks did not like to talk about it then.

Nearing also wrote too frankly about child labor abuse. One of the key donors to Penn State at the time happened to abuse children -- use them as de facto slaves -- and had Nearing fired and blackballed from academia.

Rather than slink away whimpering, the Nearings simply lived the good life and taught many young people who heard about their "good Life" through reading or else word of mouth. These (primarily) young people would travel to the nearings farms -- first in Vermont, as I recall, then later in Maine -- to learn by working on the farm and then joining in discussions led mostly by Scott Nearing.

Nearing taught at the farm and also accepted some speaking engagements until he was quite aged and no longer able to do so.

Helen's book "Loving and Leaving the Good Life" is a superb overview, and the photos of their farms and projects ar wonderful.

Some good things really renew the soul. I find that "Loving and Leaving the Good Life" is a reflection of an elderly person remembering her lifelong companion and lover and a wonderful uncompromising teacher who mostly taught by walking the walk. Their lives effectively repudiate much of our current culture and give an example of a better way.

Incidentally, Penn State retracted its ban of Nearing after he was quite old, and admitted their wrong-doing and apologized. Of course this was long after the damage was done to his academic career, for however that matters.

The Fed and all would not seem to have any common ground with such people as the Nearings.

I seem to be living the barbell life now, though with the winter setting in a bit too much computer time ;)

I am going to read a book about the European plague. Apparently some good insights on how populations deal with mass death and social chaos.

Whats interesting is the concept of partial substitution seems to be missing from the economics literature I can find.
I think thats just because I don't know how to look for the concept. Maybe Don Sailorman can address it.
I've sure its in the Economics literature its a pretty obvious concept.

As you point out it ties different energy sources together at certain price points. So at least for overall energy its tough to look at price alone. Also of course neither coal nor NG are evenly distributed but are large sources of energy in different areas so the interaction of coal/NG/oil is very regional while Oil is the most fungible of the three. Obviously the fact that the US and China have large coal reserves has played a role in keeping the price of oil down same for natural gas. Partial substitution is completely ignored by people that show how GDP has grown with less oil. The substitutes run out also. If you couple this with the known increase in velocity of money.

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2008/12/11/50308/the-velocity-of-money-a...

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/12/the-velocity-factor/

And again reference Nates original post you should have a strong desire for a stiff drink.

We used two trick to keep the US growing after it peaked in production. Significant partial substitution primarly NG for oil and using inflation to speed of the velocity of money to keep the economy revved up basically via a ever increasing credit bubble. Both trick ponies are about to be taken to the glue factory.

Very easy to survive that type of cold. I have done it for years. Just did it for a new client. Cost about $ 2K.

The solution is called SUPER INSULATION of your primary living space. Take a kitchen room and do an internal build out of 12 inches of insulation. Loss of 1 foot around the wall is really not that big a deal. Ceilings are wayyy too high anyway.. Learn to live off the floor. By that I mean shelves for everything, take advantage of all the wasted space over your head. Really, make a line on the wall 6 inches above your head height and put everything you can up that high..Why heat dead air???? You can heat a space 24 x 24 with a few candles and body heat. Simple heat exhanger for outside air...very easy to do. You waste too much time and energy running in circles. 100 year old boiler??? What is that crap???

Not meant to be critical, but, common sense and cut the waste. Your house is tooo big.
You gotta learn to live with the natural world, not force your way thru it.

Power Down.

Well, since the northern tallgrass prairies were populated before the invention of electricity, this should suggest that it is possible.

Tricks:

Dress warmly, in lots of layers, ideally wool layers (which stay warm even if wet). Wear a hat, mittens, warm socks - multiple layers, ideally, and keep the hat and some fingerless gloves on inside.

Insulate as much as possible one space, with a heating source, but making sure you have adequate air exchange - you can do this by spending money on superinsulation, or you can do it with blankets hung on the walls and bubble wrap over the windows - just make sure you have some air.

Don't expect to heat your whole house - spend most of your time in a warm, central area. You can bring mattresses in or sleeping bags and sleep there if necessary. Or, if you sleep seperately, wear layers, a nightcap/hat, have plenty of blankets, ideally down or wool or good sleeping bags, and warm the bed by putting a brick or something on the stove before you get in. You can also make a four poster bed with blankets and keep heat in. Sleep with something or someone - kids can sleep together, or with the family dog, you sleep with a spouse, etc...

Heat liquid and drink hot tea/or whatever you like regularly. Use thermoses to have a constant supply. Move around, and keep a close eye on the elderly and small kids. If you are sitting, put a blanket on your lap, or better yet, a cat and a blanket ;-).

Sharon

We will see a lot of wells where drilled in the last two years. The drilling campaign was probably getting close to the point that it was going to have difficulty replacing existing wells fast enough to offset decline much less growth. Any slow down like what we are seeing is sufficient to start a decline and it will be very hard to recover from. Also sounds like your a big player smaller companies will probably cut back faster and harder. They probably where not contributing to growth but I bet they played a large role in slowing the decline rate.

Although a different problem its similar to the stripper wells in the US the 2mbd of oil the US gets from stripper wells serves as a sort of steady anchor to production. As economics become unfavorable for the small players your losing your backstop.

The positive is of course that falling rig rates may keep some operations profitable. But this seems to be the only real positive and its not clear how it fits with the other factors. The problem is that assuming that these smaller players used credit and that this is a lot harder now even if rig rates fall they may not be able to afford to drill. They would need to save up cash and with low prices this is hard in fact they may not be profitable right now. They need to service their current debt and save cash.

What this indicates is that we will see a consolidation in the UNG field potentially with some of the big players going under depending on their financial situation. After this what we will probably see is that the remaining large players will adopt a fairly conservative strategy of slow to no growth with a focus on maintaining a certain profit margin.

This is in a sense the same conclusion I drew with gasoline consumption if you think about it as a sort of extraction problem we "deplete" our gasoline reserves rapidly and we have a sort of base demand at some level.
With a very high depletion rate.
Our gasoline consumption should stabilize at some level and then undulate with economic conditions.

So in both cases I think that we will see about the same outcome both are constrained by investment not supply
by this I mean for gasoline Americans can burn as much gasoline as they can afford world production is far greater then US consumption we simply need to bid for our gasoline. For UNG reserves are larger then production thus it is the same bidding problem. In general as far as I can tell this results in the amount being bid to follow economic trends and it has a fairly firm base i.e in both cases you can be sure that X amount will always be bid.

Thus in the case of UNG investment tends towards a constant amount. In the case of gasoline consumption the amount spent tends towards a constant. The price will be determined by where this amount fits on the supply and demand curve. If you want to remove inflationary effects of fiat currencies you can look at it as precentage of GDP since what I'm saying is we will only spend a fairly fixed precentage of our GDP on both UNG production and gasoline.
GDP is not quite the right number its really "free" cash. Since in both cases the way we measure GDP result in a increasing precentage if prices or costs increase. Maybe call it precentage of economic effort the precentage of economic transactions related to UNG and gasoline consumption tends towards a constant. If the money is a store of value then its trivial since we would spend a fixed amount of "real" money on both.

There is a saying that a ounce of gold buys a good suite and a ounce of silver buys a good meal. I'm basically asserting this that given a non fiat currency the result is you tend towards allocating a fixed amount of wealth to a problem when it becomes economically constrained.

This can be seen in housing for example when we don't have bubbles. The natural or stable expenditure on housing is historically 3X income this is the stable precentage of income. I suspect that UNG is rapidly approaching its stable precentage of income. Its not clear yet that gasoline consumption has discovered its stable precentage of income.

Of course, some finite earth types would argue that any unconventional shale play sooner or later would have problems with offsetting the growing number of older wells with high decline rates--especially since the average Barnett Shale well reportedly produces about 80% of total producible reserves in the first two years. There is also the little problem with providing the personnel and drilling equipment necessary to maintain an infinite rate of increase in drilling.

But hope springs eternal, and perhaps one of these days we will have a scientific breakthrough that will allow us to maintain an infinite rate of increase in our consumption of a finite fossil fuel resource base.