The Empty Field, the Empty Gas Tank

or: the oil and food crisis

Whenever I write something really doom and gloom, something that sounds a lot like “the sky is falling,” I find myself wanting to make the same disclaimer: I don’t want to tell you the sky is falling. Alarmism sells clicks but a click-based economy is a terrible thing, and I don’t want to live in a society like that so I don’t want to do alarmism.

But there are a lot of crises that might come to a head in the next few months. We might have the worst El Niño since 1877 (or worse), pushing water temperatures up 3 degrees celsius. That heat wave killed 50 million people worldwide. That’s a death toll greater than two World War I’s, or about 2/3 of a World War II. Famine caused by that much warming killed about 3% of the earth’s population, making it possibly the worst natural disaster in human history. A modern equivalent would be about 250 million people or so.

Global society is substantially more resilient against famine than it was in the 19th century. These days, we’ve got weather forecasts, which helps. And of course, the famine killed so many people because, basically, the British empire killed that many people by deliberately mishandling the situation.

I don’t think an El Niño will kill 250 million people this summer. But disasters, especially worldwide disasters, are stress tests on the systems we have in place.

And as I’m sure you’re aware, our current systems are in trouble.

It’s been widely reported that in the US, 70% of farmers are not expecting to be able to afford fertilizer for this year’s crop. Modern industrialized farming (what feeds most of the world) relies on petrochemical fertilizer that has been heavily disrupted by the US invasion of Iran.

There’s also a decent chance that European oil reserves will run out in May or June (I’ve read both) and that US might run out around July 4th, just in time for the 250th anniversary of the country. (I’m starting to think/hope that all the merch that says “America 1776-2026” is just prophesying a death date.) The depletion of reserves doesn’t mean “there’s no more gas,” but it means the US will move into a shortage (we produce about 60% of our oil ourselves and 3/4 of the rest comes from North America, but we don’t meet our own demand).

Seven-dollar gas is of course incredibly disruptive for Americans in their daily lives, since most of us rely on gas-powered cars to get to work and the store and such. But there’s also just so, so much oil used in food production, from fertilizer to tractors to delivery.

So… things might get bad.

I have this odd habit where I tend to think of things in terms of probability. I make up specific numbers for my threat analysis, but I’m very much just making those numbers up. There’s no reason you should use my numbers. There is no science behind them.

Most of the years I’ve been alive, the chance of some absolutely dramatic event fucking up just about everything in my life (like a global famine or a world war or a second American Civil War) hovered around 1%. Worth thinking about but not worth worrying about.

So in 2024 when the chance of a civil war spiked to about 5%, that was a really really major uptick. That was a five-fold increase. That was worth thinking about. It still wasn’t likely. I wasn’t surprised it didn’t happen. This year? This year feels like, I don’t know, 15%. I think there’s a 15% chance everything goes utterly to shit this year. But next year? After a massively fuck-off hot summer and the wars in Ukraine and Iran dragging on destroying the world’s food supply? I don’t know. 40%?

I’m genuinely very worried.

I really, really don’t want to be a “the sky is falling” kind of girl, but something is falling out of the sky, and it feels like it might be the sky itself.

But you should ignore my bullshit made-up numbers, because first of all they are bullshit and made up, but secondly because there’s almost never a specific, calculable moment when “shit hits the fan.” What is more or less guaranteed is that gas and food are going to get more expensive. And that’s something you should try to do something about, if you can.

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I wasn’t going to garden this year. There’s my terrible secret. I’m a bad prepper. I just wasn’t going to bother. I didn’t eat anywhere near all the tomatoes or hot peppers or basil I grew last year, and it just kind of wound up back in the compost. I don’t even cook that much, if I’m being honest. I’m a bad anarcho-tradwife—I spend most of my time writing and reading. So I wasn’t going to garden.

But I’ve been following the war and the weather for awhile now, and I just got some potatoes into buckets a couple of days ago and I’ll be working on my non-root vegetables probably this weekend. One of my favorite preppers, Eric Shonkwiler (you do read When-If, right?) put it like this:

It's not too late to start your garden—we've had an odd cool spell here that's kept me from planting most everything just yet, and the Super El Niño all but ensures our growing season, if we can keep our crops watered, will be extended into October or even later. You can take advantage of this.

I wasn’t going to garden, but now I’m going to, and already it’s done wonders for my mood just to get some dirt beneath my fingernails. Think of this spring and summer as your food prep months. Whatever you want to focus on, it’s cheaper to do it now than it will be soon, as prices continue to rise.

I’d recommend food storage as well. Think of food in three levels: there’s fresh food that lives on your counter or in your fridge that lasts days to weeks, then there’s pantry and frozen food that lasts months to years, then there’s deep storage food that lasts decades or centuries.

To build up your pantry, buy extras of shelf stable foods (canned food, dried foods, packaged foods) that you eat anyway and cycle through them. Most DIY food preservation is also pantry food: most dehydrated and smoked and pickled and canned foods can last months or years, but not decades or centuries. Still, this is probably the most important and useful part of your food preparedness. Most crises only last months or years, and almost no one is expecting to build a stockpile to actually survive the rest of their life with.

Longterm storage food can be bought (there are specialty producers of buckets of beans and rice as well as places that sell canned freeze-dried food) or made. You can store your own beans, rice, oats, lentils, and other such foods (especially foods without much water or fat) in mylar bags with oxygen absorbers. You can bake hardtack, which tastes like nothing and needs to be softened before you eat it but can, in some cases, keep for centuries. You can also shell out a few grand for a freeze-dryer and preserve most any food you’d like. (Freeze-dryed food lasts substantially longer than dehydrated food, overall). I haven’t tried that last one yet, but communities can pitch in to buy one collectively—which is important, because they’re real heavy-duty appliances and require maintenance and oil changes.

Also with the US suddenly stopping its soft power strategy of feeding developing nations, there are a lot of “humanitarian rations” on the government surplus market available for dirt cheap. Which is depressing as hell. I’ve got about 10 boxes of them in my basement. Most sources (read: youtube videos of people eating very old MREs) seem to indicate that properly stored, they don’t go bad very quickly, they just taste worse and have fewer nutrients.

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There’s an upside to the dramatic crisis we’re in. God’s open window, if you will.

More and more people can’t afford to live. There’s a real chance for us to propose and work towards the radical restructuring of society. What’s in place isn’t working. We have a moment to offer alternative solutions. During moments of crisis, the first people who propose a plan of action are the most likely to be listened to.

We can propose a plan. Like, you know, building a bottom-up society built out of local decisionmaking bodies that federate with one another to address larger concerns at a larger scale. Like the Zapatistas, or the Rojavans, or the anarcho-syndicalists. We might have that chance. Worth thinking about. Worth working towards.