It is not oil that sets your greatest insecurity; it is the global economy. lt doesn’t need your town. It will relocate your jobs where profits are greatest. It can flip into recession overnight and dump you and billions of others into unemployment and poverty. It will only deliver to you whatever benefits trickle down from the ventures which maximise corporate profits. It loots the Third World to stock your supermarket shelves. It has condemned much of your town to idleness, in the form of unemployment and wasted time and resources that could be being devoted to meeting urgent needs there. ln the coming time of scarcity it will not look after you. The supreme need is for us to build a radically new economy within our town, and then for us to run it to meet our needs.
Republished on carolynbaker.net.
The Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV) has recently put out an 'alert' about peak oil and the existence of a group they call the MAV Transition Community Working Group. It talks about the need for local governments to lead the adaptation to peak oil. This will be difficult in a pollity where all the power is being taken from local communities and they are being plugged into state and national systems which have been commercialised and which have no obligation to their 'customers' except to submit to some vague 'competition' in prices rulings. Nonetheless, it is the local councils which have the resources and potential networks to help people reorganise locally, despite the state and federal governments. 
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