[Anon]

This thread has hit close to home for me, esp. kochevnik's comment about PO destroying marriages. I have come close to leaving my husband over this because we live in intown Atlanta and I fear being here in the worst case scenario. I would love to move back to Portland (OR) because (and many will dispute this) if there is an urban area that has a chance of pulling together and getting through a crisis it's Portland in my view. There are a lot of like-minded people there, the city govt has an Office of Sustainability (I think it's called) that has been responsible for lowering emissions below Kyoto levels, there is fertile farmland nearby, etc. But my husband will not leave Atlanta because he has been here for years and all his friends are here (though our assorted children are all elsewhere).

The one bit of progress I have made is on the house. When we married a few years back (we are in our early 60s), he rented his house and moved into mine. His was almost paid for and mine is 80% mortgaged, which strikes fear into my heart in the event of a crash. He is now selling his house (it's under contract) and with the proceeds he will buy mine. As his is smaller, I will end up with $25-30,000, a place to live as long as I want to stay here, and the ability to leave if I decide I must. He says he is doing this in hopes of encouraging me to stay, since I told him that if I didn't sell the house to him I would have to sell it to someone else.

Still, the idea of striking out on my own at my age and with limited survival skills is scary. Plus I would miss him! If I left before things get bad, I could likely find a place to live in Portland. If I don't, I might not be able to get there in an emergency or find a place to live if I did.

He is mostly persuaded on the subject of PO, though thinks the timing could be way off in the future (or not). We have discussed Plans A. B and C and, though we are working on arrranging an emergency place to stay out of the city, he acknowledges that he has no Plan C if there is no place to come home to. It's all very stressful.

[galacticsurfer]

Since I learned about PO in beginning of November last year I had told my wife and her family all here in Hamburg Germany and my family by phone, e-mail(back in Alaska). I even sent my father 4 books for Christmas on Peak oil and various other doomer topics. He is 82 and says he has them by his bedside and reads them. My wife was irritated and depressed by me at first until I lightened up a bit and realized what i was doing to her. Now she accepts the general situation but like me accepts that we cannot know exactly how it will play out. She is Russian and went through the Gorbi years and the early Yeltsin years and does not really want to relive a near starvation year she had in St. Petersburg after price controls were lifted. The signs were pretty obvious that the system was going down there only nobody knew how it would play out. We have talked for years in doomer tones(like everybody in Germany and presumably in Japan for example) due to a falling birth rate and indebted, overburdened social welfare state with permanetly high unemployment. I always used to say to her that if everything breaks down we could go back to the states as the kids have US passports and speak English, I have a US degree and the economy there is better. After reading LATOC daily I doubt America is living in anything more than a big bubble ready to be popped. Japan and Germany have long since gotten more into reality(no housing booms here, raising taxes and cutting service, no war machine). At any rate my wife went summers to stay with her grandmother in an old fishing village in northern Russia for several months for many years and knows what it is like being off the grid and without cars(russians never had cars anyway). She is not really afraid of the crash talk and the no oil talk. We are not in debt.

When I first talked to my father about this(I call him every week for a half an hour on the weekend-my Mom is too deaf to talk to so I let it go) the first couple of weeks I was not very relaxed about it and he suggested to my "getting help" meaning going to a shrink of course. I did not get pissed off as would be normal but realised I was overdoing it and sent him books and toned down my rhetoric. My Dad wnet through the depression and his favorite author is Dickens so I compare what could happen to how he grew up in the Montreal slums or to Dickens. One of my brothers told me to get off the internet and said it sounded like the stuff we used to hear from pentecostal friends we used to know(the rapture and revelations/end of the world stuff). I see that substance is important in showing people what is going on. My panic/emotionalism turns people off. Consistency and facts show seriousness. My brother was shocked with 3$ gasoline but forgot the whole thing when the price went down again.

Since my wife's parents are Russian this whole thing with Ukraine/Russia NG dispute just recently made it real to them and more convincing what we(now with my wife's support) were telling them about a long term energy crisis.

[marika]

I get this:

Yes, you are right, but

-Why should I care? I'm old and I'll be dead by then.
-Why be a martyr?
-You are not going to save the world.
-You are arrogant if you think that anything you do can make any difference.
-See. I do listen to you! Yesterday I [insert trivial act of conservation].