Yesterday we got the annual assessment of our electricity usage in the mail.

We are on the ‘budget plan’, which means that the power company takes our annual usage and divides it into twelve equal amounts each May so that we can make the same payment every month instead of paying a few dollars in the winter months and a gazillion dollars in the summer. This makes electricity a bit easier to afford.

Every year we end up with a credit from cutting back our energy usage as much as we can stand to do so, and every year our monthly payment goes up anyway. A lot.

This year was no different than previous years. We ended 2009 with a credit of $130, which the electric company kept and applied to next year’s bill—and we still will pay more starting next month.

Why?

Because the cost of energy keeps rising, and it keeps rising really, really fast.

In 2008 we installed a pellet stove after shopping our options thoughtfully according to the money we actually had on hand. (Yes, yes, you have to buy pellets. Wood stove fanatics, please. Lighten up. We can get into it in a separate post.) We had to do it—the price of oil for the furnace that came with our 1940s house had spiked so painfully that we were already spending neary $4,000 each winter to heat 500 square feet.

The stove cost us $1300 and pellets for the winter about $500, so we recouped our costs that very first year. Pellets, though you do have to purchase them, burn at 98% efficiency and can be made out of wastewood or sawgrass—a totally renewable resource. Our stove will also burn cherry pits or corn, though we never use either. Growing corn uses a lot of resources and corn is needed for food. It seems foolish to burn it. Cherry pits are plentiful around here (we live in the fruit belt) but everyone wants them.

The year we bought the stove, we had to go to four separate businesses before we found one in stock, and even then, it wasn’t in stock—they just advertised it that way and got it to us within the week. Everyone was sold out, even though the year before they all had pellet stoves up the yin yang.

To make a long story short (and it keeps getting shorter and faster), starting about five years ago, the pace of the increase in energy costs for our rather ordinary household began to accelerate so dramatically that it forced us to alter our lifestyle—a lifestyle we had grown used to over the course of 50 years. It isn’t the end of the world by any means, but the rapidity of the change is alarming and the panicky way that people are grabbing onto alternatives is also more than a tad bit scary.

I see it in food prices too.

Yesterday I bought a jumbo bag of Fritos at the grocery store. My partner likes to eat these crunchy things as part of the lunch I pack for him every day. When I first started packing his lunch three years ago, that bag cost us just under $3. Yesterday I noticed the price had risen once again, from $3.99 to $4.99 in the space of a couple of weeks. Packages are also shrinking in a effort to disguise some of the increase in cost.

Five years ago I bought a lot more packaged food than I do today. Why? Because we can’t afford it anymore! Not that the loss is a bad thing—packaged food is really damaging to human beings, health wise—I only note it here because it is yet another change that we are forced to make because of rising energy costs.

When the trucking hub where my partner works was shut down just before Christmas of 2008 and it became clear he was going to have to drive 70 miles to a neighboring city to keep working, he bought himself a Honda Insight—which gets about 50 MPG—to get him there until he can retire in three years.

Some co-workers were interested in the car, some scoffed and snarked at the choice (lots of people around here prefer trucks) but nobody is laughing now. When he bought the hybrid, the dealership that sold it to him was ‘allowed’ only three of these cars, and all of them sold the first weekend they were in stock, at full sticker price.

We were lucky to lay hands on one.

I’m sharing these anecdotes about our personal life and finances because the recent spill in the Gulf is taking on a narrative quality that goes far beyond that of a simple industrial accident, and I think that it should. If you watch the little interview above with John Michael Greer, I promise you will feel better, not worse, about our oil situation—and hopefully it will get you thinking about life in a slightly different way.

Civilizations rise and fall. Ages come and go. But human beings do start over.

Peak oil has come and gone, and now we are well into the rapid decline phase of a major cultural unwinding. Denial is a powerful force, however, and facing this indisputable fact has not been easy for Americans. Now, with the Earth wounded and hemmorhaging the concentrated life force of millions of years of carbon organisms into the sea day after day after day, it’s getting harder and harder to keep up the charade.

That’s a good thing, actually, although the spill itself is a disaster beyond imagining—one that won’t really hit us fully for at least another month. Every day will be tougher than the day before, until one day we all realize that the jig is basically up.

I don’t think that the extent of the damage has really sunk in yet. Bear in mind that the Great Depression might not have happened at all if not for the Dust Bowl. This is clearly our Dust Bowl, and it has the capacity to be much, much more serious. The days ahead won’t be easy or pretty, and I’m not just talking about soiled marshes and dead turtles.

Life will go on though.

It will not much resemble the life we have known. There will be upheaval, pain, chaos.

And something new and sustainable will emerge.

In the meantime, we might want to think about sustaining each other. We’re all going to need the help.