[Wildwell]

There’s an amazing amount of fascination for a commodity, albeit it an important one, but what is the reason for the interest? Gas gets no where near the interest or coal for that mater. Live near an oil refinery, been on an oil rig, interested in the environment maybe?

[smallpoxgirl]

Well....I'm interested in the environment, politics, and agriculture. I'm a doctor. I'm a concerned participant in society, though I wouldn't consider myself a citizen. None of those really expresses why I'm interested in PO though. I'm interested in PO because I grew up in a society in which everything I knew was dependent in one way or another on oil. Every aspect of what I knew was in some way tied to oil. I am interested in PO, because I think it will likely unsettle practically every aspect of the life I know. Why would that not bear interest?

Coal, uranium, and natural gas, while following similar depletion curves, don't have the specialized uses that oil does. None of them, for example, is an adequate motor vehicle fuel. As someone who has lived their entire life enjoying the benefits of cars, trucks, etc, it's pretty hard to envision what life will be like once those things are gone, or even significantly rarer and harder to access.

[Chaparral]

I'm interested in PO for the same reason that I look both ways before crossing a busy street......

survival.

[gego]

Long explanation of the meandering path that lead me to a strong interest in peak oil.

Back in the 1970's I became interested in the future, mostly from the point of view of economics, inflation, freedom, and the environment. I read books like The Limits to Growth, The Population Bomb, Tragedy of the Commons, and many by the hard money authors of the day like Gary North, Howard Ruff, Harry Browne and others. I also became interested in scientific ways to look into the future, particularly mathematically oriented concepts.

In the early 1980's I moved to a small farm in southern Missouri expecting some sort of breakdown from the economic system and to be more dependent on myself and less on the system. Breakdown never developed back then, but I had the good fortune to become friends with a neighbor who all his life lived close to the land, and knew how to survive, out of necessity growing or hunting his food. Over the years he taught me plenty (back to the land basics 101) and my wife and I played Old McDonald on our farm, which was lots of work, but fun and educational.

Thankfully powerful computers became readily available to the average man, which helped in experimenting with different models. I could clearly see from mathematical models that the human population was out on a limb, and would be forced to crash back closer to the long term growth trend which is closer to 1 billion than the present 6 billion, but did not know what the trigger event would be to start the collapse. Economic collapse, war, revolution, plague, climatic change, or some unseen force were on my list of options. When I saw reports on the internet back in the late 1990's about the work done on peak oil, it became more and more apparent that it was the number one candidate for the trigger, both for the crisis described in the Fourth Turning, but also for the necessary crash in human population.

I work at increasing my knowledge of the world, and since peak oil is such an obvious danger, I want to know as much as I can about the thoughts of others on the topic, especially since I am not personally doing primary research on oil and gas.

I think this will be a difficult struggle to be one of the 1 billion survivors when the inevitable population crash occurs. Knowledge and tactical preparation are certainly advantages to increase the odds of being amongst the survivors. I also find it also very interesting to have a good picture of where I am in history rather than stumbling along as was the case when I was a young man.

[ubercynicmeister]

I am a cynic, and a Natural Strong Contrarian. This means I get interested in all sorts of things that no-one else seems interested in, like steam locomotives.

The stated reasons for the decline of steam (and there will be someone reading this who will start typing the moment they reach this line to belt out the stuff the Big Oil Propaganda Dept has taught everyone to say): steam locomotives were less efficient (they could have been easily made 3 times MORE efficient, but weren't); they were noisy (see previous point) ; they took a lot of maintenance (diesel cost more in maintenace, and always have); diesels are less polluting (diesels produce the most carcinogenic substance in the world, and may well be responisble for the rapid rise in asthma-like diesease throughout the world, as witnessed recently), etc, etc.

Study the history of steam, and one bumps squarely into the real reason for it's decline: extremely cheap oil, Oil at less than US$2 per barrel. No steam locomotive (using coal at $5 per ton) could compete.

This got me to thinking - hang on, WHY was Oil so cheap? Surely it was because supply outstripped demand (by several tens of factors), back in the 1930's?

But what happens when you persuade (by various convenient lies) everyone to switch from steam (ie: non-oil, don't forget an awful lot of steam locomotives burnt wood or bagasse from plantations) to oil-based transport?

Surely if the demand rises, the supply might rise a little, but the price must also go up? Especially if more people use whatever the commodity is.

Then some odd co-incidences started popping up: the end of Steam as the major source of motive power for Western transport occured at about the same time as inflation began to rear it's ugly head, big time: the 1970's. But hang on - this was a new type of inflation: stag-flation. Where did this world-wide stag-flation come from? And why was it that when steam ended in a country, inflation almost always began to climb?

Examples: United States railroads ended steam in the period 1955 to 1965. The inflation rate in the US started to climb about then.

In Britain, steam ended in the period 1965 to 1968. Inflation started rising almost immediately.

In Australia, steam ended in 1973. Inflation climbed almost immediately. indeed, it climbed to such an extent that people voted out the government.

Why? It wasn't until I heard about peak Oil that all these factors began to co-incide: the first bouts of "stag-flation" occured at EXACTLY the same time as the Arab Oil Shocks. Every time.

Thus the oft-repeated just-as-often WRONG excuses by the clueless Economists as to why Stagflation happened were finally dismissed, at least for me: with the decline of non-oil based transport , the world was UTTERLY dependant upon the fortunes (pardon the pun) of exactly one resource: Oil.

So, my thinking (before I discovered Peak Oil's various web-sites) was: OK, of everyone's using the stuff...well, isn't it a non-renewable energy source? So hwere's the non-oil energy sources that are supposedly getting developed right now to , well, provide us with the energy that Oil has done up to now?

And when I looked around (and joined organisations to try to do exactly this) I found that no-one was even slightly interested about the idea of developing non-oil energy sources.

Thus my interest in Peak Oil.

Ask Not For Whom The Oil Barrels Empties.