[VMarcHart]

I'm in that group.

If things get real tough before my time, you'll inherit my soda cap collection.

[NeoPeasant]

Austere times are not necessarily unhappy times. If you are someone who can be happy as long as you get enough to eat and the opportunity to bathe occasionaly, you may do fine.

Knowing this I don't fear the likely hardships peak oil will bring.

[Carlhole]

The peak oil idea has been around for decades but recent momentum has been building since 1999. Most recently, it began with Campbell and LaHererre's article in Scientific American, "The End Of Cheap Oil".

Since then, there have been hundreds of articles, dozens of books, tons of commentary on it - but it just doesn't look as though the world-at-large is buying into the die-off scenario.

Stock market speculation and investment in conventional and renewable energies is extremely active and growing. I guess the Doomers always say, "We'll be proven right in the end". But that's what cultish believers always say about whatever it is they believe in. They claim to know the future when others do not.

As far as PeakOil.com is concerned, I guess it's sexier to spout the Doom line but I just keep noticing how the numbers of page viewers keeps declining. It used to average around 600; now it seems to vary between 250 and 350.

If you wup some doom ass on the subject of oil depletion, they just start spouting off about other resource depletion. If you counter those arguments, they start spouting off about population and eco-system destruction. They should be posting on OverPopulation.com instead of PeakOil.com - because their arguments always go back to overpopulation at core.

If there were suddenly a fusion energy breakthrough, the Doomers wouldn't even break stride. It would be very bad news, in their view, because it would simply allow for the maintenance modern civilization for a longer time. In their view, it's best to see a sudden cataclysmic die-off of 2/3 of the human race regardless of whether or not peak would be the cause of it.

Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing the human race pruned back a bit too, even if I were one of the clippings. But is it realistic? I never had underestimated the ability of human beings to innovate; I seem to have much less contempt for science than the Doom crowd seems to have.

I'm expecting to see a big energy crunch and whopping huge response to it. We haven't seen anything yet.

[benzoil]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('NeoPeasant', 'A')ustere times are not necessarily unhappy times. If you are someone who can be happy as long as you get enough to eat and the opportunity to bathe occasionaly, you may do fine. Knowing this I don't fear the likely hardships peak oil will bring.

[CarlosFerreira]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('benzoil', 'I')t's the Go-Go-Prozac-burnout-more-is-better crowd that will be unhappy. Many of them will forever bemoan what they lost. Seeing as how I see a slow slide, I figure I'll have to listen to these people for a very long time. In that sense, I wish I were more of a doomer.

[Twilight]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Interfector', 'B')y that I mean, anyone who believes that the era of cheap oil is over, and that life will probably get steadily tougher for the majority of people, but doesn't think that we'll be resorting to cannibalism to survive within a decade, but that could be a potential scenario in the future if the right action isn't taken now.

[EndOfGrowth]

Total economic meltdown....yes, people boiling each others heads or fighting over insects in the garden.... no, which I suppose makes me a moderate doomer

[benzoil]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('CarlosFerreira', 'M')aybe a couple of channels, with endless MacGyver re-runs to teach people how to repair stuff?

[heroineworshipper]

Doom will be middle ground soon enough.

[Typo]

If "middle ground" is economic crash and famine but no cannibalism, then I'm an optimist. Tough times are most likely ahead, but the gears of change are already turning. You can bash Pickens and Gore all you want, but this is just the beginning of the tipping point. Just like Carlhole said above, the doomer party line is "sexy" on peakoil.com, and it's sexy to throw around graphs of oil production plummeting precipitously beginning NOW and then predict the decimation of the planet's population. I believe a plateau and slower decline is more likely. Under those circumstances, there will be tough times, but enough time to move to energy alternatives.

Frankly, I think many doomers around here believe in peak oil like a religion. You'll see threads like, "Do you think people who don't believe in peak oil are dumb?" and people calling someone who strongly disagrees with them a troll (like cube). Having left a religious cult myself, I've recognized some strikingly cult-like mental behavior around here. Pretty fascinating.

Another thing I've noticed.

Is it just me or do the extreme doomers post in one-line sentences all the time?

It's as if they're writing a news report.

As if each sentence is a "zinger" that will burn the opposing argument into the ground.

Maybe it's just me.

Or maybe it's just Monte and Cashmere.

But no, you aren't the only non-doomer around here.

[Mudpuppy]

Moderate here. It`s also 6.15 a.m here in rural Japan though and the coffee isn`t ready yet so my brain hasn`t fired up either . But I don`t expect zombie hoards, however through economic force (i.e; we can`t afford to waste it so much as we can`t pay the monthly bill), I think there is a lot of room for powering down. Recessions will happen, but they have always happened and are a natural part of economics.

The main issue is not too little oil, but too many people. But the glut of people being added to the planet are not in the places where the oil is being used. However this also can be useful in the future if we can find other sea transport methods (Crops produced in Africa for example use less oil to produce than in England even when accounting for transport, mainly because African agriculture is not as oil dependent as Western agriculture). Much of the third world countries farming and agriculture industries were killed out by competition from Western subsidy backed Mc-farms (corn in Mexico for example).

Western farms will have to face a time when their subsidies are thrown out and they can`t compete in the face of higher oil as opposed to under developed countries agriculture that is labour intensive but not oil intensive.

But there are big if`s in all of this (how will climate change affect things, arable land, effects of over utilised land such as saltification on irrigated land, fertiliser issues, etc, etc). But my coffee pot isn`t ready yet so that has to wait.

The main effect that people are comimng to now is that we have a fantastic lifetsyle unlike any other generation has ever know, but we have to start going back to living like our gransparents did. The pain in that for moist people is that if we had always lived like that then there would be no issue, but we have been given this wonderful new era and seen what cheap oil can give us, and then it is fading away. "You mean Grand ma and Grand pa washed their dishes by hand, and had no clothes dryer, and had to keep chickens to eat food scraps, provide garden manure, and get eggs from,.... wow, they lived like animals".

[allenwrench]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Typo', '
')Frankly, I think many doomers around here believe in peak oil like a religion. You'll see threads like, "Do you think people who don't believe in peak oil are dumb?" and people calling someone who strongly disagrees with them a troll (like cube). Having left a religious cult myself, I've recognized some strikingly cult-like mental behavior around here. Pretty fascinating.
.

[allenwrench]

Well, really our forum makes no demands on the beliefs of its membership. It has no requirements to believe or not believe in peak oil. It does not specify the level of doomerism or lack thereof within the group. This forum is for anyone interested in the ramifications of crude depletion, so of course we will have all sorts of people here.

Maybe extreme views do not corollate with age, but I believe that a lot of the extreme views here comes from young people that speak before thinking. And if they do think before speaking, they do not have the practical living experience to temper their views.

Would be interested in the number of young doomers compared to older doomers here and match the age to their extremism.

[AlexdeLarge]

Count me in this group. I am a Panglossian! LOL

I do believe Peak Oil is real and it is imminent. I do think we could be in for another Great Depression. But it would not neccesarily be due to peak oil, but because of other stupid things we did as a society.

There have been so many end time groups that have predicted our dismise throughout history.........and we are still here. I could not say that it is beyond the realm of possibility that someone, somewhere may come up with another energy source as good as or even better than oil. Maybe not likely, but not impossible.

So remember ..........Look at the bright side of Life !

[Typo]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('allenwrench', 'W')ell, really our forum makes no demands on the beliefs of its membership. It has no requirements to believe or not believe in peak oil. It does not specify the level of doomerism or lack thereof within the group. This forum is for anyone interested in the ramifications of crude depletion, so of course we will have all sorts of people here.

Maybe extreme views do not corollate with age, but I believe that a lot of the extreme views here comes from young people that speak before thinking. And if they do think before speaking, they do not have the practical living experience to temper their views.

Would be interested in the number of young doomers compared to older doomers here and match the age to their extremism.

[TheDude]

Is Peak Oil nothing more than a Cult?

Where will the supply come from to overcome declines in 2011? Maybe Brazil will have some big projects coming online to balance things out; but we're only three years out, and these things take time, which seems to be true of many of these big supply projects, whether oil or automobiles. People expect everything on demand, including catastrophe.

Moderate leaning towards Doom myself. The behavior of our politicians this year doesn't make me the slightest bit more optimistic, and when shortages appear they won't go away - reverses in declines never rebound to their original level except in the case of political factors, and we haven't taken any major breaks in global consumption. People simply refuse to stop and consider how central oil has been to modern industrial society - and I'd consider that mindset much more cultish than that of the peak oil crowd, who are by and large simply blunt realists, with a proven track record so far, by the way.

[Ghog]

Moderate here, but mainly because we don't know how the masses will adapt and what the politicians will do.

I tend to have some small hope because there are people already planning for a simpler lifestyle and others who are moving away from sources of waste like SUVs. Does that mean I think things will get better before they get worse? Not a chance.

I do see the World economy crashing, energy and food shortages and a lengthy recession. This will decrease the population World-wide, which will make it easier to gradually come out of the harsh times ahead. Either way it won't be an easy time and it will depend upon the powers that be and the people who elect them. Done wastefully or selfishly, it might end up being more on the doomer side of things.

[Typo]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TheDude', '
')Where will the supply come from to overcome declines in 2011? Maybe Brazil will have some big projects coming online to balance things out; but we're only three years out, and these things take time, which seems to be true of many of these big supply projects, whether oil or automobiles. People expect everything on demand, including catastrophe.

Moderate leaning towards Doom myself. The behavior of our politicians this year doesn't make me the slightest bit more optimistic, and when shortages appear they won't go away - reverses in declines never rebound to their original level except in the case of political factors, and we haven't taken any major breaks in global consumption. People simply refuse to stop and consider how central oil has been to modern industrial society - and I'd consider that mindset much more cultish than that of the peak oil crowd, who are by and large simply blunt realists, with a proven track record so far, by the way.

[jtmorgan61]

Moderate here. I cooked up some reasonably detailed models of the demand destruction we're likely to see across different major countries in the world (using both ASPO and Simmons/OilDrum projections.)

Under these scenarios, global use declines to 79% (ASPO) or 58% (Ace) of current use by 2020. Assume U.S. use declines faster as we are a net importer, say to 68%/48% due to oil importation, structural weaknesses, and greater demand elasticity (i.e. inefficiency.)

Let's look at the critical sectors that would have to fail, in order of survival importance. Agricultural equipment and fertilizer take up 3% of current usage. Trucking takes up 12.7%, but certainly not all of that is critical to food supply. Construction (of food distribution, electrical plants, vehicles, etc.) takes 1.9%. Heat and hot water take 5%. Asphault takes 3%, Water Freight 2.5%, Rail Freight 2%.

Add it all together and even assuming no efficiency gains in these sectors (which is of course likely) it adds up to just 30.1% of the current oil supply - i.e. we can just about cover it with what we're pumping now.

But it's not all sunshine and roses. Some sectors have to get downsized pretty significantly to make the math work, particularly personal transport and air travel. Demand destruction in these other sectors is serious enough that it's hard to imagine all of it coming from efficiency gains. That means price signals will have to be bad enough for people to give up their daily commute so they can eat. It means some nasty recessions in the pipeline.

Sizeable production from 2nd-gen biofuels up to the sustainable projected level of 20-30% of daily use helps *a lot* with this issue when plugged into these models. However, it's tough to project more than a 1-2 mbd contribution before 2015. Thus 2010-2015 is emerging as a critical period, though it seems like bottom-up projections on the oil drum are showing much smaller declines out through 2015 than predicted by the models.

I also see oil depletion being a major problem causing tension on the world stage, with oil exporters and rapidly developing countries consuming ever more oil in the face of global declines, forcing importers (read: U.S./OECD) into steeper consumption declines that cause recessions. The least developing countries are going to lose out, and there could be a lot of civil instability. I think being a member of the urban poor in a third-world country is just about the worst position you could have in this crisis.

In the end, I think that what conclusions you draw about the fate of society come back to what you think about people. This is what I perceive to be the core doomer argument: people are inherently bad or have become soft and greedy and violent and evil in the modern consumer driven state. Thus they will not pull together and put down their weapons at a time like this, and so resource wars will be launched and society will break down in social disorder after a few hard recessions. At the end the evil overconsuming humans will learn their lesson, get what they deserved, etc.

Personally, I think that people are if anything less bad than they were in ages past (serfdom, slavery, religious rigidity, a massive death rate from wars, etc.) I think a slow-moving, clearly perceptible crisis will bring out the best in most people. I feel more sure about a quick response (that admittedly should have been about 5 years ago) than ever, given the rapid reaction the wider culture, venture capitalists, etc., are having to soaring oil prices.

BTW, my modeling spreadsheet (Excel format) is available if anyone wants to play with the numbers.

[benzoil]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jtmorgan61', 'I')n the end, I think that what conclusions you draw about the fate of society come back to what you think about people. This is what I perceive to be the core doomer argument: people are inherently bad or have become soft and greedy and violent and evil in the modern consumer driven state. Thus they will not pull together and put down their weapons at a time like this, and so resource wars will be launched and society will break down in social disorder after a few hard recessions. At the end the evil overconsuming humans will learn their lesson, get what they deserved, etc.

Personally, I think that people are if anything less bad than they were in ages past (serfdom, slavery, religious rigidity, a massive death rate from wars, etc.) I think a slow-moving, clearly perceptible crisis will bring out the best in most people. I feel more sure about a quick response (that admittedly should have been about 5 years ago) than ever, given the rapid reaction the wider culture, venture capitalists, etc., are having to soaring oil prices.