There are several areas of concern to keep in mind when looking at the effects of stratospherically priced fossil fuels and possible local reactions:
 
--transportation
--food production
--electricity production
--residential and workplace heating
 
The main ones that keep me awake at night, however, are food production and residential heating. We can muddle through with vastly reduced transportation capabilities and electricity, but food and warmth are of paramount importance.
 
With regard to food production, I have little to say because I don't have a background in agriculture. However, it seems logical to presume that our future will see more of the following:
 
--vegetarianism and dairy and egg production (due to certain inescapable facts associated with ecological food chains and thermodynamics)
--biodiesel production for running farm implements and food transportation
--decentralized garden plots and the associated canning, drying and curing, etc, needed to maintain enough food stocks for overwintering.
 
Residential heating is something that I've looked into a bit more closely, since it's something that I can apply to my own house. In addition, it's the easiest way to carbon emissions (see the graph below)
 

 
A geothermal retrofit for an individual house is a possibility, and it is very efficient, since the heat in the ground is free. In fact, geothermal is about 300% efficient. Contrast that to the most efficient natural gas furnaces, which are only about 90% efficient. However, a geothermal retrofit for a single house costs about $20,000, so the initial outlay doesn't come cheap. Perhaps neighbourhood based geothermal schemes would be a better idea. And while we're at it, we may as well go for the Drake Landing example in Okotoks, which accumulate free solar warmth in the summers and distributes it over the winters. I suspect that it is more than 300% efficient.
 
In the short and medium term, however, the average householder may want to investigate the concept of superinsulation which has the potential to allow home heating from only the warmth generated from the people and appliances in a building. There are several renovations needed to make a house superinsulated:
 
--R60 for roof insulation
--R40 for wall insulation
--high efficiency windows
--enclosed porches for exterior doors
--airtight construction around windows and doors
--heat recovery ventilator
 
The easiest fix of those mentioned above is getting airtight construction around windows and doors. Weatherstripping is dirt cheap.
 
The next easiest fix is increasing roof insulation to an R-60 rating. This is equivalent to about a two foot depth of blown in insulation. Our family did this last fall for a cost of just over $1,000 and we noticed a very marked improvement this winter, in terms of how often the furnace switched on. In fact, what I've done over the past several years is to keep an account of the ratio of time that the furnace has been on versus off at various outside ambient temperatures (done before sunrise or after sunset, so that solar warming of the house is not a factor). Then, every time we make an improvement to our house, we can chart how this affects the bottom line of our energy usage.
 
High efficiency windows are a bit more of a grey area when it comes to investing money in retrofits. A couple of years back, we spent an average of $1,000 per window in our house to change out the old units for triple pane, argon filled, high-e reflective windows. This made a significant difference not only for heating in the winter, but also cooling in the summer. However, some time later, I found out that high efficiency window lose about 5% of their argon every year. Given this, it's hard to say whether a switch is worth it (though if your existing windows are really crappy, then it probably is a good idea). Another option is to install interior storm windows made of plexiglas that can be inserted into the window frame via magnets on a seasonal basis. The last time I hunted through the Yellow Pages, I was able to find at least one contractor in Red Deer who specialized in this. Needless to say, this would be quite a bit cheaper than $1,000 per window.
 
Enclosed porches for exterior doors is a necessity, since it not only provides another dead air space for insulation, but it ensures that not as much outside air makes it into the house when entering and exiting. If you're not able to afford this--or able to convince your significant other that it's necessary--the next best thing is to get a really good storm door installed. This creates the necessary dead air space to really make a significant difference. We got one installed for our front door a few years ago, and we not only noticed that the main door was subsequently not as cold the touch, but also that there were no more instances when there was so much frost build-up in the lock that it wouldn't work.
 
The cost of increasing the R-value in exterior walls is relatively expensive, but not prohibitively so. A typical house built in the last decade or two will probably have 2x6 studs in the walls. This translates into a nominal R-value of 19. Unfortunately, a lot of heat gets lost via conduction through the studs. Taking this into account, such a wall will have an actual R-value of only 15.
 

 
Part of the answer to this problem lies in adding another layer so that heat will not escape out via the studs.
 
In addition to this, there is the potential to take advantage of a radiant heat loss barrier. In junior high school, we all learned about conduction, convection and radiation. A conventional exterior wall depends mainly on halting heat loss via convection. There is a huge potential, however, to halt the heat loss associated with infra-red radiation.
 

 
Low-e windows do this. The emergency blankets that ambulance personnel use do this. In fact, NASA does this with space suits. In space, the temperature shifts associated with a sunny exposure versus a shaded exposure amount to a difference of several hundred degrees celsius. Early calculations figured that a spacesuit would have to be seven feet thick in order not to boil or freeze the astronaut. Fortunately, NASA decided to utilize the efficiencies of radiant heat blockers.
 
The same thing can be done with houses. When I googled "radiant", "heat", "barrier", and "residential", I found numerous site, both commercial and academic that testified to this. I also found a company in Red Deer that retrofits houses this way with p-2000 insulation, which is a foam barrier with reflective surfaces on both sides. Depending on the thickness (3/8" to 1"), the effective R-value of one of these sheets ranges from 15 to 27. Thus, if the homeowner with 2x6 walls were to retrofit, he/she would go from an effective R-value of 15 (remember the heat loss through the studs) to one of 46 (ie, 15 brought up to 19, and then add 27).
 
It's not an easy fix. Even with a 3/8" addition of p-2000 sheeting, the window and door sills on the average house may need to be extended outwards. Our house is a duplex and the cost for a contractor to come in and do everything was a bit over $11,000 for our half of the duplex. However, this did include making additions on to all of the window and door sills, and it did include upgrading the siding to a much tougher (albeit still plastic) siding.
 
I suspect that we will get it done in the spring, though. The additional benefit is that the house will remain much cooler in the hot weather, since the reflective surface is also on the outside of the panels.
 
This page is still under construction. More to follow.