Practical Ideas for the Dawning Energy Crisis and the Economic Sunset

The following is a little Friday freebie as I move on to writing my Deeper Dive, and hopefully you’re going to help finish the writing with your own ideas:

A paying subscriber asked me to write an article, if I could, about things you can do to prepare for the worst that is coming. Right after she asked, I came across a list of a couple of easy and totally practical suggestions by Hal Turner that will work for a few, so let me, at least, share that short list:

If your home uses home heating oil for the Winter, call your local heating oil supplier and tell them you want your oil tank at home FILLED, right now. As soon as they can get a truck to your house.

If your home uses BOTTLED NATURAL GAS or BOTTLED PROPANE GAS, call your gas supplier and tell them you want your tanks filled - right away.

It’s Summer now, but Summer is ticking away. When the weather starts to get cold, you don’t want to be among the people that have no heating oil or gas to heat your house. Or no gas to cook with. Get the furnace oil tank or the propane tanks refilled NOW. ASAP.

Planning and taking action NOW is important because right now, the general public has absolutely no idea at all what seems to be coming. The news media . . . . useless. They “report” only what their government masters tell them to report. By the time the news media starts covering this, the shortages and outages will already be here. They’ll only cover it because they can’t ignore it anymore.

Once this starts hitting the news, the “masses who are asses” will all be calling to get heating oil, to get propane, trying to get gasoline cans for storage. And it will be too late.

Please pass this article along to family and friends that you care about. We’ve got to get the word out now, while there’s still a short window of time for people to get prepped.

Those are things you might as well do if you have that kind of storage because prices are most likely going to rise considerably, even if shortages don’t hit you. You might even see, if you go through more than one tank in a winter, if you can pre-order a second shipment for future delivery and pay now at today’s prices to lock those prices in. This, of course, is if you have the cash flow or savings to handle it. I wouldn’t do it with debt.

For most people, there is not a lot you can do. Let me use myself as an example: Turner has told his readers to also stock up on gasoline. If my wife and I still had our farm, I would be buying some blue barrels of gasoline and diesel and treating them with fuel preservative to get me through the winter because I could store those safely outside and away from buildings. I already had a hand pump for the barrels because I bought my tractor fuel that way.

Now we live in a residential neighborhood with a normal-sized city lot. I don’t want to have that much fuel sitting that close to the house, especially not in my garage. If I bought a barrel of gasoline to store in the garage, my Jeep Grand Cherokee would literally go through all of that in two tankfuls. It gets pretty good fuel mileage at 25 miles per gallon (for the kind of go-anywhere vehicle that it is), but it takes 25 gallons to fill the tank. One barrel would be a short-term supply for any short fuel shortage, but I don’t want the risk of a barrel of volatile gasoline in my garage for the sake of just two refills. So, I will just have to tough out the shortages because it’s not worth the risk to me. I don’t even keep the lawnmower gasoline in the garage. At the farm, I also had a propane tank, so I’d be filling that up, as Turner suggests.

The one thing I have long recommended, I’ll repeat for those who are new: When you go shopping, do as my wife did today when she went to Costco. Buy extra amounts of everything you usually buy that has a long shelf life. Put your normal operational supply in the kitchen or wherever you usually put the weekly groceries. Put the rest in storage and keep your hands off of it when you run out in the kitchen, or if you use something to avoid a trip to the store until tomorrow, make sure you replace that and add one more when you go to the store tomorrow.

Each time you go to the store when your operational supply runs out, repeat the above until you have as much stored as you can go through during each item’s written shelf life. Then start rotating through that supply before the shelf lives expire. The nice thing about this approach is you don’t even have to think about what you need. You know you are only buying the things you ran out of in the kitchen, which is all stuff you usually use. So, you’re just automatically picking up an extra amount of that within the limit of what your cash flow and your vehicle can handle. It’s almost automatic, other than the extra lifting, and you have nothing that you don’t like to eat. Worst case scenario if shortages don’t materialize, you saved yourself on inflation because that is certainly coming.

Sorry that’s not much, but let me encourage all my readers to reply with their ideas because that is maybe the best thing I can recommend—build communities that can help each other. So, here is chance right here to turn this into a community of like-minded people for sharing your best and easiest ideas (the really practical ones that people can do without a lot of extra labor) to get ready for the possible shortages and inflation to come:

Hopefully, if you check back here from time to time, you’ll find a growing exchange of ideas that you can share with others and benefit from yourself, and hopefully those you share with will add their own ideas here. Maybe, at some point, I’ll pull together the best of the best as an article: