(If this were 1977, we might actually have something to be proud about...)
PeakOil is You
People are finally 'getting it.'
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People are finally 'getting it.'
by emersonbiggins » Mon 12 Nov 2007, 03:08:09
Brent Musburger gets it. FARKers get it. People I occasionally talk with on the bus get it. College football fans get it. Peak oil is finally seeping into the minds of the public, it seems, and if I had to guess a percentage of the public apprised of it, I would guess 5% perhaps. (probably more like .01%) Nevertheless, the word is out, officially, so ladies and gentlemen, let us carry on towards the next step.
(If this were 1977, we might actually have something to be proud about...)
(If this were 1977, we might actually have something to be proud about...)
"It's called the American Dream because you'd have to be asleep to believe it."
George Carlin
George Carlin
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Re: People are finally 'getting it.'
by venky » Mon 12 Nov 2007, 09:32:36
Yes, but will that lead to the 'next step'?
For instance everyone knows about global warming, and a significant percentage of people believe in it. But how many people have significantly changed their personal lives?
The point being we are nowhere near the threshold for any serious action about oil depletion.
For instance everyone knows about global warming, and a significant percentage of people believe in it. But how many people have significantly changed their personal lives?
The point being we are nowhere near the threshold for any serious action about oil depletion.
I play the cards I'm dealt, though I sometimes bluff.
Only Man is vile.
Only Man is vile.
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Re: People are finally 'getting it.'
by roccman » Mon 12 Nov 2007, 10:23:40
From Capitol Hill to California and Brussels to Beijing, multinational companies are stepping up their lobbying and tweaking their product lines in response to demands that they get more environmentally attuned. New companies -- even new industries -- are challenging the established giants to exploit a growing market for everything from green cars to green fuels.
Hmmmmmmmm...
Seems like we have been here before.
I think what humans in the industrial world need "to get" is that business as usual will not work moving forward...
Oh but we will try.
Hmmmmmmmm...
Seems like we have been here before.
I think what humans in the industrial world need "to get" is that business as usual will not work moving forward...
Oh but we will try.
"There must be a bogeyman; there always is, and it cannot be something as esoteric as "resource depletion." You can't go to war with that." Emersonbiggins
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Re: People are finally 'getting it.'
by Ludi » Mon 12 Nov 2007, 10:49:50
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('venky', 'F')or instance everyone knows about global warming, and a significant percentage of people believe in it. But how many people have significantly changed their personal lives?
From what I've seen, most people don't want to change because they don't want to be the first to do it, they want everyone else to be changing too, or changing first. Therefore if we want people to change we need to model new ways of living which look attractive.
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Re: People are finally 'getting it.'
by roccman » Mon 12 Nov 2007, 11:02:36
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('venky', 'Y')es, but will that lead to the 'next step'?
For instance everyone knows about global warming, and a significant percentage of people believe in it. But how many people have significantly changed their personal lives?
The point being we are nowhere near the threshold for any serious action about oil depletion.
For instance everyone knows about global warming, and a significant percentage of people believe in it. But how many people have significantly changed their personal lives?
The point being we are nowhere near the threshold for any serious action about oil depletion.
I am not convinced "knowing" about GW is that wide spread.
Even on this board loss of ice on the North pole was met with " well there is record ice formation on the south pole"...
Is there??
The change was predicted by John Mercer, a glaciologist, he said. The late Dr Mercer, who worked at Ohio State University, theorised that the collapse of ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula could be a harbinger of the disintegration of the much larger West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would raise global sea levels by six metres over the course of a century.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'H')is warning was first published in the journal of the International Association of Scientific Hydrology in 1968, but attracted little attention until it was published in Nature magazine a decade later. Now it has the UN Secretary-General’s attention as he prepares for a UN climate change conference in Bali next month aimed at trying to agree limits on “greenhouse gas” emissions once the restrictions specified by the Kyoto Protocol expire in 2012.
No - I do not think humans "get" very much...
We eat...put drugs in our body...play the victim...fuck...then die.
"There must be a bogeyman; there always is, and it cannot be something as esoteric as "resource depletion." You can't go to war with that." Emersonbiggins
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Re: People are finally 'getting it.'
by Gerontion » Mon 12 Nov 2007, 11:11:26
I'm not sure that anyone's got anything, other than perhaps a cold. Showing today on the BBC. For all the excitement about passing references on the news to a future supply crunch and assuming that physical shortages haven't become apparent at the pumps, as long as this kind of thing is being pumped out by mainstream broadcasters (what the hell is "limitless quantum energy" and exactly how long until we "have a personal fabricator that re-arranges molecules to produce everything from almost anything"?), I don't think any major transformation in public consciousness can be expected.
[web]http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/visions-future.shtml[/web]
[web]http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/visions-future.shtml[/web]
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Re: People are finally 'getting it.'
by aflurry » Mon 12 Nov 2007, 13:34:59
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('roccman', '
')...eat...put drugs in our body...play the victim...fuck...then die.
')...eat...put drugs in our body...play the victim...fuck...then die.
roccman, you are a funny dude.
where to i get one of those t-shirts?
i think maybe the price of oil has got some people discussing oil supplies in general. but i don't see anyone getting anything beyond and understanding that gas prices may go up.
at this stage i almost cannot understand any major political or economic event outside of the curve of oil production that corresponds to it.
i see it in the increasing debt load leveraging our economy, starting at just the point when per capital oil production plateaued. i see every bubble, whether in equities or debt/mortgages, to be an expression of the growth of that leverage which is underpinned by increasing scarcity of our major primary resource. i am spooked by FASB 157, and what it could do as a peephole into the real value of that debt.
i see the waves of privatization over the last 30 years to be a form kind of fracturing of the promise of the future that the mid-century fantasies of limitless energy maintained.
i see the peak in oil production to be about so much more that prices rising. i understand it as a major threshold that has the potential to invert much of the political and economic causality we see today. i kind of see it like the dew point where water changes state from gas to liquid, and all of its properties and behaviors change completely.
i am afraid that we have been able to leverage the ever decreasing rate of growth to a greater and greater degree as we have approached peak, but that peak represents an absolute limit on leverage, and even more ominous, perhaps a halt to our ability to levarage the economy in the way we currently do at all. and as soon as the peak is registered throughout the economy, all of the existing leverage will collapse, and the economy will very quickly shrink back to its "real" size, which is a small fraction of the current inflated beast.
it may be that this is all just my own personal paranoid fantasy, but i certainly don't see much of anyone getting it.
edit: well fuck a duck... Kunstler's rant of this morning has explained with far more coherence my fears of above:
http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/ ... money.html
Last edited by aflurry on Mon 12 Nov 2007, 16:05:42, edited 1 time in total.
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