This was posted by at the CFN comments section to JHK's post today:
You know those spot shortages you were talking about? The entire island of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia pretty much ran out of heating oil about a week before Christmas. That’s about 135,000 people with about 70 % of those living in what is sometimes called “Industrial Cape Breton” in the Sydney area; a once thriving coal and steel city. The population has been declining here for years now but seems to have accelerated more recently as industry after industry shuts down and people chase the energy production bucks raining down in and around Alberta. I’m sure there are lots of threadbare places like this in the US as well, where the scary reality is starting to show under our worn out coats of comfort. That we’ve been eating and sleeping in a nice cozy back eddy of energy flow; and that we’re about to enter the actual stream again.
I feel fortunate that we’ve been able to make the move to a small farm where we grow most of our own food and heat with our own wood. Some of the folks around us and most of those living in small towns around the island don’t have that ability any more. I think this problem may manifest at first in a way where the energy poor may be thought of in the same way as society now considers homeless people; that their situation is somehow their fault and that it’s really too bad and we feel sad about them, but we really don’t want to talk about it. Who knows how long it will take society at large to realize how pervasive energy dependence is and that the majority of us will no longer be able to afford as much of what it offers.
The two links below to the short CBC News stories tell of the day the island ran out and of how many people now have to cope with not being able to afford the minimum amounts of heating oil that the trucks will deliver.
http://www.blogger.com/You%20know%20those%20spot%20shortages%20you%20were%20talking%20about?
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/nova-scotia/story/2008/01/03/heating-ns.html
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