[RonMN]

Maybe after 2 days in jail the old bitty will stock up on D'jorno's

[Ghog]

I'm curious about everyone's 'first time'. The minute you finished hearing about Peak Oil, what were you thinking? 'This guy is a crackpot', 'I need to read more about this', 'Boy, we're doomed' or anything in between.

A big part of dealing with/accepting the new emotions brought on by PO awareness, is discussion. Especially for some, like the lurkers, who have yet to communicate their thoughts, sign up and tell us what your impressions are. How are you coping with this new reality? Right now there are 3 times as many guests on as members, so there are quite a few new thoughts out there. Come in and share.

[RonMN]

I stumbeled across LAOC totally by accident. At first it irritated me and i set out to disprove it...after studying PO for 4 or 5 months it finally dawned on me "GOOD GOD ALMIGHTY I CAN'T DISPROVE IT!"...



Many emotions after that...now i try my best to prepare and keep up with the latest oil related events (as well as other news). I find it funny how much more you can pick out of the news AFTER you're PO aware.

[_sluimers_]

Mine was: "Aha! Just as I suspected..."

[Reality_Conference]

I had the FTW site in my favorites folder for some time and was familiar with the term "Peak Oil." I don't know of a specific date but gradually my understanding came around to just what it meant. I then bought Savinar's book and once I got through reading it I was totally blown away. I'm still trying to come to grips with this. The problem for me is the fact that all the indicators are already out there that this "thing" is the real deal. You just have to know where to look and how to interpret the data once you see it.

For example, there is an article right now on the Yahoo Financial page that says, "Despite surging energy prices, the economy continued to gain in the 2nd quarter." As if it is a temporary thing that will one day pass. Sigh.

And as far as my "first" reaction--well, it was something along the lines of, "ok, I'm gonna get drunk as hell and temporarily numb myself to this deal." I did that and it didn't really help. When I woke up sober it was still there.

[hotsacks]

I came across Hanson's Die Off site one gloomy winter's night. It was a revelation, and I guess PO.com has become a kind of Book of Revelations.Tthe added benefit of hearing some very bright and very funny people talk their heads off makes the bad news bearable. The ideas I've found here have forced me to confront the discomforting fact that our civilization is a desert.That fact has been strangely heartening. I sense the same in many who post here.
It's not all bad,this peak oil.

[Seeker]

Peak Oil, for me, was an "oh, shit." moment. It was kind of horrifying, in a "why didn't I expect this?" kind of way.

I learned about it from LATOC back in March, and then I subsequently clicked on all of the links, checking his research. In a couple of days, I had a completely new mindset and was looking for ways to become sustainable. To this day, no one has come up with any fundamental solution for the system we're stuck in, and so I'm looking to build an alternative system.

Peak Oil is less of a huge deal now, because in my further forays into the unsustainable nature of our systems, I realized that Peak Oil was only likely the first in a long line of upcoming catastrophes. Even if we solve this crisis, we have a lot more coming our way, not the least of which the complete destruction of our ecosystems.

I feel somewhat angry, and somewhat frustrated, when I think about all of the problems in the world. I know it's not the fault of anyone alive today, but rather the fault of the system -- but sometimes I still feel like I've been handed all of the world's problems. "Oh, by the way, you're going to have to solve all of these, at least on a personal level, or else you will die."

But what's worse is the ignorance and apathy all around me. As someone who has always been exceptionally aware, it's very difficult to communicate the ideas that I have with people that are only concerned with the trappings of our culture. It saddens me to think that so many people have been blinded, worn down, and trapped by our culture.

I could handle Peak Oil, I could handle all of the world's problems, I could handle everything a lot better if there were people to talk about them with. And I don't mean on a discussion board, or the short/oft-pointless discussions I have with people in real life, or the various arguments or disagreements people get stuck in. If there were a group of aware and creative people out there that I could be a part of, it'd be a lot easier.

For now, this will have to do.

[Nike62]

I've chosen "Internet Site" even if my "discovery" happened browsing a mailing-list of politics.
One day (mid december 2004) someone shared a copy of the Savinar's book, which I immediately downloaded.
I read it in a couple of ours (my english is very bad but this book is plainly written, as you probably know).
At the end, I couldn't have any doubt about our fate, due to the overwhelming mass of data and analysis...
I felt really sad and completely disheartened for a month!
After that I've recovered a bit, and now I'm doing "job as usual", observing the events in a fatalist mood...

[trendal]

Actually learning about Peak Oil left me rather calm. I've always known that "something" was wrong with this civilization, and that "something big" was going to happen in my lifetime. I'm not sure why, but I'm also not the only person I've heard say this.

So when I learned about Peak Oil I simply thought "oh...so THIS is what it's going to be?"

[fred2]

I stumbled across it when surfing a year or so ago. Initial reaction was: that cant possibly be true, else I'd have heard before. Something like that ought to be BIG news. Anyhow being an inquisitive type I googled around and what I found began to alarm me. I got hold of Deffeyes book on Hubberts peak and realised this wasnt a joke.

More recently I read Simmons 'twilight in the desert'. Given who has written that, and what it says, it really ought to get this subject well out into mainstream media as a critical topic of our time. It hasnt yet made it (in the sense of 'peak oil' appearing as a front page headline). But I think it will within 12 months as it looks very likely demand may exceed supply in that period with a big further price rise, and people will be asking questions. There's only so long that every rise can be explained away by hurricanes, threatened oil workers striking, or Iraq. None of these are now 'new' events, just repeats of the same events, and as such, unless there is some other force at play (PO), the price should bumping along as opposed to spiralling.

[Eli]

I first heard the term while having a pint with my brother and my cousins. The next day googled the term and started reading what Simmons Defeyes was saying.

At first I dismissed it out of hand then I was like "Holy Sh*T we are going to hit friggin Peak OIL!"

I am much better now tho, now I am more like "holy sh*t we are hitting friggin Peak Oil."

I cannot prepare enough for the unknown crisis ahead so I am just going to try and keep a step ahead of the next guy and keep my wits about me.

Ron is right after you are PO aware you can see it coming from a mile a way. The great unwashed masses are too busy to see the coming crisis.

[Clouseau2]

It saw it online on a system I have an account on in Berkeley. There was a link to a peak oil article.

I read it, thought about it for a while, and then spent the next 2 days feverishly reading every article I could find on the topic.

And then I got really bummed out for 2 months!

Now I'm kind of resigned to just dealing with whatever happens as it comes. I've got a good friend with a solar-powered house in the mountains with a well, if things get really bad I'll probably move in with him I guess.

[freelight]

i learned from a family member. My brother is a self sustainable farmer, and has built his own home, uses solar and wind, built his own wind turbine, carved terraces out of the rocky hillside with his own backhoe and has a massive orchard. when he told me this i was taking it in with much more info than i was able to digest all at once, but i most certainly believed him. he has also told me about the use of certain strains of mushrooms that will cleanse the soil of toxicity - fascinating! i mean beside the fact that we need to move to a sustainable culture, we also need to detox the planet. especially with what i expect will be a boom in nuclear energy (and waste).
years later i heard about it after i had forgotten about it at indymedia.com - it linked me to afterthecrash - since then i've been a regular here (lurking mostly).
get it together!

[BrownDog]

Reading the snippet of "The Long Emergency" on the Rolling Stone website was what got me digging deeper. I had heard the term Peak Oil and not taken it seriously before. I've been a sponge since, reading books (Heinberg, Deffeyes, and Kunstler) and web pages (dieoff, LATOC, etc.)

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Seeker', '&')lt;snip>
I feel somewhat angry, and somewhat frustrated, when I think about all of the problems in the world. I know it's not the fault of anyone alive today, but rather the fault of the system -- but sometimes I still feel like I've been handed all of the world's problems. "Oh, by the way, you're going to have to solve all of these, at least on a personal level, or else you will die."

But what's worse is the ignorance and apathy all around me. As someone who has always been exceptionally aware, it's very difficult to communicate the ideas that I have with people that are only concerned with the trappings of our culture. It saddens me to think that so many people have been blinded, worn down, and trapped by our culture.

I could handle Peak Oil, I could handle all of the world's problems, I could handle everything a lot better if there were people to talk about them with. And I don't mean on a discussion board, or the short/oft-pointless discussions I have with people in real life, or the various arguments or disagreements people get stuck in. If there were a group of aware and creative people out there that I could be a part of, it'd be a lot easier.

For now, this will have to do.

[Ayoob]

First came the drinking... then came the guns... then the rice...

I'm pretty much making it up as I go along. So far everything's OK, though. I'm on the right track.

Become valuable.

[jtmorgan61]

[QUOTE]I saw Kunstler's article in rolling stone, although I'm sure I saw the topic somewhere in a number of newsgroups (I've been researching non-carbon energy alternatives for quite a while).

I wasn't sure whether he was right about peak, and I was strongly suspicious that his predictions of the collapse of suburbia reflected a personal agenda and limited understanding of market forces and alternatives to oil.

Now I see that he's right about peak. The rest of my read of his inaccuracy was also correct (see Aaron's thread, Why Oil Alternatives Will Fail, for my dissection of why coal to oil, thermal depolymerization, and oil sands are likely to take up enough slack to buy a couple of decades for alternative transportation technologies to develop).

[jtmorgan61]

dupe

[Jdelagado]

I found it from a link on Craig's list.

I don't know what to believe after reading this for 6 months or so.

You have the peak oil "story" from this site and others........ and then if you listen to Alex Jones, he'll say it's a scam..........

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/ap ... ilscam.htm

And, who owns peakoil.com??

Most domain name owners can be looked up through register.com.... NOTHING IS LISTED FOR peakoil.com....

Does the IMF own it?

jdelagado

[aldente]

I was listening to KPFK, the listener sponsored radio station in LA and I forgot what the topic was. Listener phone calls were comming in and one caller stated in a sort of emergency mode that everything could be explained with PeakOil. That's all he said without further explaining it. For some reason it stuck with me, back at home I did a search and - what a revelation - I saw my all so dear reality that I lived with up to then being carried away by this monster.

[Seeker]

ROFL, jdelgado...

That's hilarious. And the 3000+ posters here, we're all owned and operated by the IMF?

I swear, sometimes people don't seem to THINK.

Try looking up the registration for other sites like LATOC, EnergyBulletin, etc.