[Pops]

From now on when a poster insists on derailing and debating peak oil in general in a thread where others are debating a specific facet of the situation I'm going to split those posts here.

Pops

[MD]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('eastbay', '
')
Painting the entire peak oil movement with the crooked brushstrokes of a few outspoken idiosyncratics will create a highly distorted picture of not only the movement itself, but the dire depletion scenario as well.

L....

[Loki]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Arthur75', '
')
lol, otherwise one thing for sure that can be said about the "peak oil movement", is that it isn't at all a movement, in the sense that no policies (besides homesteading and survivalism) is put forward, like puting a directly redistributed high volume based tax on fossile fuel for instance ...

[ian807]

The fact of the matter is that understanding "peak oil" requires looking at a lot of numbers (e.g.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil) and making sense of them. Neither doomers nor cornies seem to want to do that sort of thing. It also means understanding things like energy return, economics (e.g. price feedback), and complex interlocking systems (money, energy, transportation, food production, supply chains) and the ways in which they can fail.

The fact that the situation is so complex works against any easy scenario like "We're all doomed!" or "Energy forever, whee!" You might as well try and predict the weather on July 23rd, 2045 at 3:15 in Boise, Idaho. It's not possible. You can pull out some general trends (energy gets more expensive and depresses the economy) but anything beyond that gets tricky. Does expensive oil increase investment in alternatives like geothermal and nuclear or do all alternatives simultaneously become too expensive for investment. Do governments step in and try and develop energy resources? Or do they hoard oil, making the problem suddenly worse?

Precise prediction is a fool's game.

[MD]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', 'I')f you gradually raise the temperature of water, you can cook a frog because he never figures out the temperature of the water is rising.

If you gradually raise the price of oil, you can crash the world's economy and most people will never figure out the basic problem is that the price of energy is going up.

[Ferretlover]

I agree, MD. A slow boil it is, and how frustrating is that? Good thing we all have prepping to occupy our time.

[Windmills]

Calm down, please. How many conditionals do I have to insert for a reader to understand that I'm just hypothesizing? People on this board are normally acutely aware of them and quick to point them out.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Windmills', 'I') think most of the old vanguard proponents missed the mark by assuming a sharp peak whose movement would would be dominated by conventional oil. The peak itself may also not be the defining moment of transition. I'll hold my nose while I say it, but Yergin was right about the plateau. I think the trouble will start when we run out of $100 oil, $110 oil, $120 oil, $130 oil, and $140 oil. If the breaking point of the global economy is $150 and there are no oil substitute less expensive on which to fall back, we have fully collided with the problem of peak oil. We will not be able to afford what is being produced, and there will be nothing less expensive. There will be no alternatives, no choices. That's when the pain sets in. I think part of the question is now "how much more sub-$150 oil is there left?" assuming we can adapt to prices up in that range. We might also want to consider the proportion of cheap and expensive oil in the mix. That might have some impact on the timing of the troubles to come. The closer the global oil mix becomes to be dominated by expensive oil, the more pain we'll have from that issue, too.

[sparky]

.
I stand with pops on this one ,
the value of an idea has little to do with the flakiness of its suporters , either it work or it doesn't
Newton was a keen alchemist well versed in the Kabbala and esoteric nonsense
so was Copernicus

As for the proponents of social meltdown with zombies roaming the land ,
I believe it's romantic nonsense , societies just don't colapse like that
they don't pop like a balloon , they glide like a landslide and not everywhere at the same time or the same amount

The worst COULD happen in mega cities ,but a few soldiers would keep the food queues orderly
it happen all the time in disaster zones , often several time a year

I could be wrong but to believe otherwise is simply impatience ,
the deep desire to see one's justified , that's simply ego

[babystrangeloop]

Could this be the core of the Mike's issues?
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]The End of The End: How the Peak Oil Movement Failed
By Mike Bendzela / OpEdNews / January 2, 2011

... I was a victim of this conspiratorial thinking: Years ago, I attended a "peak awareness" meeting where I met a young filmmaker who asked to interview me about peak oil. I did and had a nice long conversation with him about peak oil. Little did I know that the film would turn out to be a platform that simply recycles Mike Ruppert's paranoid claims that peak oil was the motivation for the 911 attacks staged by the United States. Seeing my scenes edited together with scenes of Ruppert saying Flight 93 was "shot down" over Pennsylvania nearly made me ill. This movie will embarrass me in perpetuity on the Internet. Perhaps it serves me right. ...

[MD]

Certainly it's enough to invoke a rant. It's all rant worthy business.

[The Practician]

I am personally fairly new to the peak oil scene, having stumbled upon it while researching a paper on whether or not electric cars/hybrids/biofuels/hydrogen could save the western way of life. I guess you could say I had a pretty solid background awareness of energy issues, but hadn't seriously tackled concepts such as the EROEI of biofuels or tar sands Bascially, I was a "slow crasher" before I even knew what a slow crasher was. This was only last spring that I was researching all this, but it was very interesting reading things people had written back in 2005 vs. now, and how silly some of it seems in retrospect. This must be especially true for people who have been following energy issues for much longer than I have. That said, I read a number of Peak Oil/economic decline blogs, and I think that sometimes the people who get characterized as flakes are the victims of others taking their simplifications of complex concepts at face value, and then either: (A) accepting the simplification as "the truth", or (B) dismissing the concept outright as a "conspiracy theory" or something equally derogative.

The best example of this phenomenon I can think of is probably Greer. Taken out of context, a lot of the things JMG writes about on the Archdruid report could be used to paint a picture of him as a robe-wearing fast crasher who predicts we will all be cooking our meals in hayboxes and doing all our engineering with slide rules by no later than the fall of 2017. Oh, and lets not forget that he's a Driud and practices Magic. Obviously he's a complete loon.
The facts of his beliefs, as they become apparent to anybody who has read the entire backlog of his blog, differ greatly from what you might expect them to be if you had only read a small sampling of his work. Sure, maybe his loose timeline for the collapse of industrialism isn't quite the same as yours or mine, But I'd be hard pressed to name a more "respectable" peak oil writer more capable of explaining the reasoning and context behind any particular personal belief of theirs as Greer is.

[Novus]

The PO movement was never meant to have broader public appeal. It is boarder line forbidden knowledge like the Club of Rome was.

[MD]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Mike Bendzela', '
')
This all has nothing to do with the "timing" of peak oil. It has to do with the whole lot of peak oil soothsayers becoming something of a freak show.

[Moto]

It is nice to see there are a handful of people that seem to understand the bigger issues with energy development.

I wonder how much better off the world would be if there was no media.

[basil_hayden]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MD', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Mike Bendzela', '
')
This all has nothing to do with the "timing" of peak oil. It has to do with the whole lot of peak oil soothsayers becoming something of a freak show.

[evilgenius]

I have to admit the public's view of us mirrors my own internal debate about PO to an extent. Sometimes I feel certain we are doomed. Sometimes I feel certain it's going to take a long time and that man will figure it out. Hey, I still vacillate on how doomed we are and I predicted on this very site before the sh*t hit the fan that the economy was going to go into the crapper. At the same time I was also one of those talking about the introduction of a plateau rather than a sudden dive in production. I am worried. I think I am more worried, however, about what man will do knowing only in certain capitals and amongst certain groups that PO is very real, while the rest of the people keep on keeping on. Throughout history this kind of thing has always produced great wars. All you have to do is read Yergin's work, The Prize, to see what I mean. As for timing, well, before it happens it can seem like it is going to take forever to happen. After it happens, even if 'it' is a long emergency, it seems like you can see nothing else but the new reality and that the old paradigm was either a dream or a time to prepare that you failed to take advantage of.

[killJOY]

Pops is right: I used to post here.

I have posted a more complete 'rant' about my disillusionment with 'peak oil' here:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Hubbert-s-Hacks--The-Peak-by-Mike-Bendzela-110108-625.html

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') am not saying the doomers are completely wrong: The catastrophic scenario is not implausible. I just don't know. There is no mistake that peak oil is one of the--if not THE--issue of the Twenty-First Century. We've never been to Peak Oil Land before, and we will only go there once.

But predictions are notoriously slippery things. When they seem to come "true," we may be fooling ourselves, because in this dark world and wide, so many predictions are being made in so many quarters that some of them are bound to come true, by chance alone. And if one person launches a whole boatload of predictions, one of those is bound to come true, by chance alone. And if a prediction is sufficiently broad and unspecific enough, many subsequent phenomena can be shoe-horned into the glass slipper to fit the prediction. And if a prediction doesn't come true, all we have to do is say, "Just wait a little longer." And.... Why bother making such predictions at all?

[Bruce_S]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('killJOY', 'P')ops is right: I used to post here.

I have posted a more complete 'rant' about my disillusionment with 'peak oil' here:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Hubbert-s-Hacks--The-Peak-by-Mike-Bendzela-110108-625.html

[killJOY]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'P')ractician wrote:

But I'd be hard pressed to name a more "respectable" peak oil writer more capable of explaining the reasoning and context behind any particular personal belief of theirs as Greer is.

[Cog]

What is reprehensible and disgusting about the truth?