I find myself annoyed when cliche slogans are accurate. So it annoys me that yes, the best time to get prepared was yesterday. The next best time to get prepared is today.
It’s time to get prepared. Or, if you’re a regular reader of my content, it’s time to check on, and shore up, your preps.
To be clear, I’m not particularly worried about nuclear war. No more than I was yesterday. I’m a big believer in preparing for everything, but you’ve got to have priorities, and nuclear war should always be pretty low on your list, because it’s unlikely, hard to prepare for, and hard to survive even if you’re prepared. In an awful lot of scenarios with nuclear war, you and everyone you love will die more or less without notice.
Sure, you can get iodine tablets to flood your thyroid to reduce your risk of one specific cancer (though those tablets are contra-indicated for anyone over 40). You can actually, surprisingly, build a DIY fallout shelter fairly easily, and maybe one day I’ll bother. But nuclear war is either coming or it isn’t, and it’s quite possible it will simply end life on earth, so honestly it isn’t worth worrying much about.
No, it’s the oil crisis that has me worried, and it’s going to have knock-on effects. A fifth of the world’s oil passes through the Hormuz strait in the Persian Gulf, just south of Iran. I woke up this morning to news that oil tankers were burning. This is the largest disruption to the oil supply chain in history.
I feel weird focusing on the economic impacts on Americans when describing a war that is fought by a madman war monger like Pete Hegseth who lifts fake weights to try to look buff and views morality as weakness. It’s a wildly immoral war being waged by two wildly immoral regimes (against a third country ruled by a wildly immoral regime, but as always it’s the people themselves who are suffering). But I can only write about so many things at once.
There were a series of oil crises in the 1970s caused by tension in West Asia. In 1973, most Arab countries refused to sell oil to the countries (like the US) that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War (six years earlier, in the six-day war, Israel had stolen the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from neighboring countries, and in 1973 various countries tried and failed to halt that land theft).
The embargo quadrupled oil prices in the west, leading to energy rationing and a stock market crash that reshaped US economics and therefore world history. The revolution in Iran in 1979 led to the doubling of oil prices and a second oil crisis. During these crises, there were miles-long lines outside of gas stations, with people fistfighting over pumps and stealing from one another’s cars.
Already gas prices have gone up around fifty cents and could reach $4 by next week. The economy was already in trouble, with the US losing 92,000 jobs last month. So it couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Which is to say, the current war on Iran might (or might not) lead to much bigger issues than “gas is 50 cents more expensive.”
The price of gas impacts the price of everything. The stuff we buy at the store was driven there in trucks that burn gas. Fertilizer is made from petrochemicals (whether or not it should be) and food will get more expensive to produce.
We’re already in an economic crisis, of course. And that crisis is going to deepen. If the current energy crisis is short, retailers and distributors will eat the cost. But if it goes on a month or more (according to what I’ve read) then the costs will reach the customers, who were already struggling to pay for what they need. I personally can’t imagine the US is capable of wrapping up a war in a month.
So then, preparedness. How do you prepare for an oil crisis? Well, more or less the way you prepare for anything: shore up your ability to survive short and medium term supply chain shocks by maintaining a few days or a few weeks worth of supplies at home. Food, water, medicine. Backup power. Keep extra shelf-stable food around by buying slightly more than you use every time you go to the store. Deepen your pantry.
You can store gasoline, but it’s complicated to do. Personally, I only did this for a little while because it’s a pain to maintain. Since gasoline is not shelf stable, you have to rotate through your stocks every 3 months or so (slightly longer if you get ethanol-free gas, and slightly longer than that if you bother to add additives). If you want to store gasoline, get good quality gas cans, fill them up, and write the date on them. Store them tfor two months and then put that gas in your vehicle and fill them up again.
Personally, I only bother doing this when there’s a reason to suspect there might be shortages. Like, you know, now. I guess I’m going to go get some gas today.
But in general, just fill up your vehicle more often. Make it a rule that you don’t park at home with less than half a tank of gas. It’s the same price in the end to keep your gas tank topped up.
If you were thinking about getting an electric car, it might not be a bad moment to do so. It’s hard to say how an energy crisis will affect the cost of electricity, but it probably won’t hit as quickly or dramatically as the price of gas.
But the most important thing you can do to prepare yourself for an energy crisis is the same step that is always the most important step in preparedness: build community.
This is something more and more people are doing anyway due to the ICE crisis, in which armed gangs roam our streets kidnapping people. There are rapid response networks being set up all over the country, and frankly I can’t imagine a better network to be plugged into for any crisis than neighbors who are concerned for, and willing to fight for, other neighbors.
The way I’ve seen people build hyperlocal community is a two-pronged approach. One prong is to start getting together with the people in your neighborhood with whom you have the most ideological or subcultural affinity. Punks meetups, anarchist meetups, or I guess transgender furry meetups (whatever you zoomers are into). Try to get together regularly for dinners or potlucks or lube wrestling or whatever y’all are into. Create a signal loop for it. This group of people is easier to organize because you’re starting from a similar place. But it’s not enough.
The other prong is to organize with all of your neighbors who are willing to share a basic bottomline idea like “we shouldn’t let armed gangs kidnap our neighbors.” This is a reasonably popular sentiment, and you’re likely to find people who agree with it. You can call for building a rapid response network, but you can also call for a barbecue or a block party. I have this suspicion that the block party is going to be the single most important social structure of the revolution. Your goal with your neighbors might not be to actually organize right away, but just to help each other be known in each other’s lives.
I’ve written a decent bit about preparedness before, if you’re curious:
I was just thinking about you on my drive to work. Funny how time works. I've gotten lazy with the baby steps I had taken with preparedness over the past few months. Despair setting in, I guess. I was thinking I needed to actually, finally check out your podcasts to instill more hope in my days. And then you send a reminder to prepare. So, thank you, Margaret, for continuing to be a bright spot.
I'm trying to remember this right now, less because of the Iran stuff (though there is that) and more because where I am, we know ICE is coming back. I live in a building of mostly immigrants. They're mostly older people, and including a lot of non-Latinx immigrants who belong to "model minority" groups. And lots are US citizens. So they think they're safe. But I know from being part of rapid response that my neighbors are in no way safe. I'm working on ways to connect with them more, so that when the time comes, we're organized. Whether that means mutual aid, or handing out whistles, or whatever it looks like. But the first step, for me, right now, is to be a trusted source of information and to convey the importance to them in a way that gets through versus "the white queers in unit blah think we're a bunch of illegals, yikes".