[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'A') simple selective search of all Plantagenet's comments on the peakoil.com forum database returns 4820 with the term 'Obama'. Are those gushing love letters?

I don't think so.

[onlooker]

It is an Obama lovefest

[evilgenius]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jesus_of_suburbia', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'M')ontequest, on the other hand, was kind of emotionally repressed. He found it almost impossible to express himself in the first person. He hid behind boilerplate quotes from Catton and Bartlett. So he just seemed more like a bot than a real person. He would reveal what he did for a living or some of his pet projects like making raised beds, but he NEVER admitted to any emotional anguish over doom. Only when he was boxed into a corner and had to cop to some situation with his ailing mom, and then he disappeared for like a year because it got too personal.

I don't necessarily expect this site to be a support network, and at times it actually has served the opposite purpose, brushing up with people who were keyed into doom but seemingly wired the totally opposite way that I am, but I just want to know they're human.

[evilgenius]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ennui2', '.').. make people hate Obama ....

[ennui2]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', '
')A simple selective search of all Plantagenet's comments on the peakoil.com forum database returns 4820 with the term 'Obama'. Are those gushing love letters?
I don't think so.

[ennui2]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('evilgenius', '
')I kept saying that's what you do, no matter what because people matter. I don't think you can give up if you operate out of free will, which is to say that you operate out of the dictates of your heart and tell reality all about it with all of your body, mind and soul.

[ennui2]

I gave up hope around Climategate/Nopenhagen. That really was the last chance were we could move towards some sort of global awakening instead of shrugging it off and focusing on the economy.

People have really short memories and they forget massive events like LiveEarth that came and went without making a dent.

The fact that the only straw I've got left is to be a Musk fanboi is pathetic. I am following him not because I think he's the savior but because I've really got nobody else left to admire who has any sort of national exposure. McKibben's 350.org is a bust, for instance, and the guys' been on the press circuit a few times, like Letterman. Nobody pays attention to activism anymore. The only way to get through to them is to give them something to buy.

[onlooker]

Maybe from the ashes of this decadent world-wide civilization will arise it's antithesis. If as some philosophers and savants have declared, humans ultimately seek a balance a type of ying-yang, then this will make sense. Let us hope some sort of ashes remain to resurrect some kind of functioning society. But even more so let us hope that this society is very different from the current one.

[Ibon]

Read JMG's essay from this week. He makes reference I believe to the post Ennui made regarding his shifting the goal posts from a few hundred down to 50 years.

[onlooker]

Wow I think Greer response was magnificent. I quote his paragraph "Now of course there’s nothing inconsistent about any of these statements". The decline and fall of a civilization isn’t a single event, or even a single linear process; it’s a complex fractal reality composed of many different events on many different scales in space and time." This should be evident to anyone analyzing all this. Also, Ibon it is consistent with your other thread in which you pointed out that many factors will play into collapse/die-off or resiliency. The US like other rich countries are not equipped to function in a non fossil fuel world. How will the US and other countries adapt? That is a huge question. So I must give Greer much credit for defending his position so well. Collapse is not a moment but an ongoing process that is complex and uneven as Greer said both in time and space. Periods of acute challenges could be interceded by periods of somewhat stability happening at different times in different places. I do believe however that the future will test our ability to cooperate concomitant with our propensity to compete. We must see ourselves as all in the same boat. Truly the adage United we stand divided we fall will be applicable in the future to come.

[Loki]

He reiterated his position, which I don't find contradictory. Collapse won't happen overnight, it's a long, punctuated process. Yep.

But his constant scoffing at the fast crashers is somewhat ironic given that he takes some pretty "fast crashy" positions. Contrary to the protestations in his latest blog post, the notion that most Americans won't have running water or electricity within the next few decades is a fast crash proposition. Not overnight armageddon, but a massive collapse within the lifetimes of many Americans.

His posts last year about Ebola are even more fast crashy. An example from 10/1/14:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'M')eanwhile the Ebola epidemic has apparently taken another large step toward fulfilling its potential as the Black Death of the 21st century....

[T]he steps that could keep Ebola from spreading to the rest of the Third World are not being taken. Unless massive resources are committed to that task soon—as in before the end of this year—the possibility exists that when the pandemic finally winds down a few years from now, two to three billion people could be dead. We need to consider the possibility that the peak of global population is no longer an abstraction set comfortably off somewhere in the future. It may be knocking at the future’s door right now, shaking with fever and dripping blood from its gums.

[ennui2]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')I see them as different expressions of the same event: the 2005 peak of inexpensive conventional petroleum and world-wide demand destruction.

[ROCKMAN]

pstarr/ennui - In a way I agree/disagree with both of you on a number of aspects. As you know the date of PO is totally irrelevant to me. It's all about the Peak Oil Dynamic. And it's easy to focus on the POD in one's own universe. There's been some POD pain in the US over the years but nothing on the order of the great suffering in other areas of the world. One can even go back 70 years to those aspects of the POD that motivated the Japanese military command to push its govt into attacking the US fleet at Pearl Harbor. More recently one could attribute the violence in the Ukraine at least partially the result of the POD.

[ROCKMAN]

Well said pstarr. It's all far to complex to fit on a bumper stick or expressed in a few short lines on a blog. But it often takes such a turn just like so much like of our political and economic discussions: focus on a single aspect ignoring the interconnections. I know I get long winded at times but even then I often don't go into enough detail.

[ennui2]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', '
')Yes, I have faith in facts. You've never explained how supposed speculation caused a run up to $147 oil.