[mefistofeles]

In 2004 I became aware of peakoil. My first reaction to peak oil oddly enough wasn't to stockpile food,water or tools but to watch a second concert of my favorite band the Corrs .

What made the concert so unusul wasn't the fact I had seen the band just thirteen days before but the fact I had to fly all the way from California to New York.

I thought if peakoil was coming I might as well see the Corrs properly with front row tickets because this oppurtunity may never happen again!

Oh well I guess that's a strange reaction to peakoil but that's what I did.

Its been nearly two years since I flew out to see the Corrs. Yes peak oil hasn't hit and civilization hasn't collapsed.

The world had two years yet so little has changed. People still drive as though gasoline were free and current gas prices are viewed as high.

Even though peak oil hasn't happened I'm still a believer because its better to believe in something bad and be minimally prepared than to be a complete fool and caught totally unaware. I believe on the whole the consequences for being a peakoil realist are better than for Cornopian no matter how low the price of gas.

Better to be thought of as a retard who cries chicken little than the man caught unawares by unavoidable disaster.

[Madpaddy]

I'ld fly halfway around the world to see Andrea Corr myself.

[killJOY]

Fall, 2003. I read Dale Allen Pfeiffer's "Eating Fossil Fuels." This led me to from the wilderness . com.

"Oh, yeah," I thought. "I learned about this in 1980."

Twenty-five years used to seem like a long time.

[sylviah]

I read JH Kunstler's article in Rolling Stone in the waiting room of my OB's office while waiting for a prenatal appointment in 2005. I had already read his previous two books about how soulless and unsustainable the suburbs are.

So I read the article and talked to my friends about it. Most of them had read it or heard about it: it was party conversation material in young-hip-blogsavvy-NewYorkers social circles for a while, although the main reaction was usually, don't worry, we'll enviro-finesse our way out of it, have you heard about the latest hybrid design? I hear methane hydrates are going to totally replace gas, etc, etc.

Eventually I bought the whole book, The Long Emergency. My husband read it first, and then read passages out loud to me while I was in labor. Sounds ridiculous, but it was really calming. Maybe because it was so obviously not a hoax, it was concrete, detailed information about the end of our way of life. Really took my mind off the contractions.

And yes, my first reaction wasn't to run out and by tinned spam and a rifle. Mostly, I was pretty distracted for a while by taking care of my son, who was colicky and a terrible sleeper. My husband and I just tried to enjoy living in the city as much as possible: we went out to restaurants we had never been too, went to see plays, had friends over.

I did look into the idea of buying land, but realized there was no way we could afford it at current prices, and so paid off my student loans instead. I've done a lot of thinking. I don't want to live off in the woods on my own, and, having already tried the intentional community adventure/disaster previously, I'm under no illusions that people can choose the perfect group of friends and move to a lifeboat community and live happily ever after.

We moved to an apartment with a backyard so we could have some space to grow a few vegetables, but we're basically planning on staying in the city. No-one knows how this is going to play out, and honestly, I'd rather weather out a crisis with my friends and neighbors than isolate myself out in the country... If we have to, we'll make our way back out to my husband's parent's house, they have a little bit of land and are in walking distance to a small town.

A few of our friends and us have a running joke about TLE (our nifty little acronym for The Long Emergency). Anytime we try to make plans, like go to the movies, or meet up at a restaurant, one of us will inevitably say, "Sure, I'll meet you at 7:30. If TLE doesn't come first, of course. In that case I'll be too busy learning how to make my own saddles." Or "shear my own sheep" or "grow my own barley and brew it into beer".

[MattSavinar]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sylviah', '
')
Eventually I bought the whole book, The Long Emergency. My husband read it first, and then read passages out loud to me while I was in labor. Sounds ridiculous, but it was really calming. Maybe because it was so obviously not a hoax, it was concrete, detailed information about the end of our way of life. Really took my mind off the contractions.

[Aaron]

There's a Kuntsler CF joke in here somewhere...

[sylviah]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')Come on tell the truth: hubby read LATOC to you during conception now didn't he?

[UFCjunkie]

When I first was aware of PO I thought...PERFECT! This is what we need! This is what I have been waiting for!

Before I was aware of PO I thougt there wasn't going to be an ending to the killing of this planet, atleast not when my generation was still alive. But with PO I saw an "quick" ending to the madness we humans are responsible to.

I want Peak Oil to been long gone allready but I just have to wait and hope it comes soon if it not allready happend. And the effects of PO I hope not come long after that. I want it to happen now. I can't stand the way we treat etchother and our surroundings. We need to wake up from our addiction and start living as humans.

So when I first heard/read about Peak Oil I was filled with hope, hope that this planet does have a future! We humans soon don't have the power to keep destroying our selfs and our planet.

Right now I'm just waiting for the effects to take place...if it ever does.

[thuja]

Katrina and the gas price surge was the tipping point for me. After doing the research, I just about shat my pants. I of course knew that we would reach a peak and decline...I just didn't realize how soon that time was coming.

What did I do? I bought a lot of silver...found a job 2 miles from where I live, got heavily into bicycling, bought a wood stove and retrofitted my house to be an urban homestead. I've been busy. Every day I walk around dazed and amazed and at a world of bright lights and seemingly oblivious people as I think in my head "How much longer will this continue?"

[PhebaAndThePilgrim]

Good day from Pheba, from the farm:
Before Peak Oil, there was Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. I read Ishmael several years ago, and the book literally rocked the foundations of everything I believed in.
I am more of a feeling person, and less of a thinker I guess.
I internalize information in my environment, and my conclusions come across as feeling.
I have felt something is dreadfully wrong for many years now.
I began having bad dreams about people not having enough to eat in 1985. The dreams continued relentlessly until I read Ishmael.
From Ishmael I merged into The Party's Over by Heinberg.
I planned on teaching a course on energy issues at our local vo-tech center. I met with a geologist at our local university.
He kindly gave me a whole bunch of information on petroleum and lectures from Dr. Bartlett.
The shock factor became worse.
The class I was suppossed to teach was cancelled by the head of the vo-tech center. (religious right member with a bible on his desk). He said that there was not enough interest in energy issues to merit the class)
I have watched the entire farming community lose their minds over ethanol. Land has jumped to over 4 thousand an acre here.
We can no longer afford to feed corn to our cattle at 4.00 a bushel.
The shock just gets worse and worse.
I tend to suffer from anxiety anyway. So I have really had to learn how to chill.
I find that Legend of Zelda, Twilight Princess really helps. lol.
The colors are just georgeous, and it's a great escape.
Yep, 51, a farm wife, and loves Nintendo.!
All if it began some years ago with Ismael.
I belonged to a book club at local library. I asked the head of the group if Ishmael could be our monthly read one month.
The head librarian threw a fit and said that Ishmael was not a fit book to read. Sigh!
Have a great day anyway. From Pheba, from the farm.

[dissimulo]

I thought it was more lunatic BS from the end-of-the world crowd. I ignored it for a few years after, until events made me wonder if there might not be something more to it.

[MonteQuest]

In 1972, I read Limits to Growth and knew a peak in many resources was coming, including oil. At the time, my main concern was not that we were running out of oil or peaking in it's production, but that we couldn't continue to burn it in our atmosphere, no matter how much we had.

In other words, global warming and air pollution.

In 1980, I read Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change .

In 1989, I became a National Park Ranger.

In 2004, I came here following research for my book. I was surprised how fast the advent of PO was coming.

The rest is history.

[theozarker]

I read an article about peak oil about two years ago and googled the term - which led me here and to LATOC and several other sites. My first impulse was that I had to warn people. I talked to relatives, posted articles on some of the sites I frequented back then, even contacted the mayor with infor and asked what we were doing to plan for it. Often, I got the usual "pooh-poohing". But having done several years of research on life here in the Ozarks in the early 1800s for a book I was writing, my first thought, after the panic subsided , was "this is survivable". So I began developing a five year plan, collecting bits of info from the web and books I already had on old time skills used around here, expanded my garden and took a look at how I use energy now, and how I might find alternatives.

I am 66, live in a 107 year old house in a lower middle class/working poor neighborhood, in a small city here in the Ozarks, and have about a quarter-acre yard. I have no illusions about running off to the (plentiful) woods and "surviving" there, but I do think I could survive here with my friends and neighbors if we work together and help each other.

One thing that gave me real hope was the town's reaction the the severe ice storm that swept through here and much of the midwest in January. We lost power to 75,000 homes in a city of about 200,000 people. Within hours, one of the DJs (who usually spends his morning show dissing us dems) went on the air to take calls from people who needed various kinds of help and people calling in to offer it. This went on for over 48 hours straight and off and on for days. No one panicked, very few took advantage of people, and everyone made it through by sharing and going out of their way to take people without heat or electric into their homes. Our electric was out for 12 days, but I shared my gas heat and food with my son (whose furnace had an electric blower) and a young couple I'd never met who were friends of his. This was pretty much everyone's attitude and it seemed to be a spontaneous reaction.

I know that wasn't comparable to peak oil, but my parents - who had a little church in a rural part of Oklahoma - had survived the great depression the same way, as did many people around the country. I just don't think we've lost all of that in the 70 years since then. I t's deeply ingrained in us as a country. We've never totally trusted the govt. and still don't. And we've always reached out to help one another in emergencies.

Survival of peak oil will be horrendously difficult, but I'm going with my first instinct - that this will be survivable (though certainly not "life as we know it") if we stick to what we've done best in big crises - hunker down, share, barter and make do in a pinch.

Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I'm betting on the best in us outweighing the worst.

Linda

[billp]

Our high school chemistry Mr Ageter teached worked for the oil industry before teaching.

He told our chemistry class about peak oil in 1955/6. He drew a normal curve on the black board and explained that oil was a finite resource.

My first and continuing reaction is that peak oil is something to watch for.

I was a bit concerned about peak oil in 1972/3 which I was on sabbatical leave in computer science at U Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We bought a new gas guzzling Ford F2250 4x4 in 1972.

The next oil panic point was in 1980. Iraq/Iran war.

We had just moved to Albuquerque to work at Sandia labs.

Prudhoe Bay and North Sea oil appears to have got us through that crisis.

The present oil crisis looks to be the most serious. Especially if there is an armed conflict with Iran!

Senior citizen perspective.

[Twilight]

My first reaction was a rush of excitement as so many different observations forgotten in the back of my mind unexpectedly made sense.

At school in the 1990s I had been shown simple charts showing the world had 40 years of oil, 60 years of natural gas, 200 years of coal. I could sense the sheer power of the energy being used around me and instinctively knew it was important. And I had questions about those numbers, whether they would hold true as demand increased, and whether population growth would outstrip the Earth's ability to provide. I could see there was a disparity between where the resources were extracted and where they were used. I got the feeling that there would be a crisis, and it would not wait 40 years, it would strike in 20 years, when people understood and made a grab for the remainder. I explained that to my father, it made sense to him, and he thought it was a pretty profound thought for a teenager to be having. I concluded by 2020 the world would be fucked.

I also thought it would be a cool area of work to inhabit. Ringside seat for the challenges we probably wouldn't overcome.

In 2001, I sat in amusement as an engineering lecturer, an energy industry man, demolished the BP Statistical Energy Review. Then early in 2002, by pure chance I came across a review of Deffeyes' book "Hubbert's Peak" while searching the reference pages of the New Scientist for something unrelated. Reading the review, many years of suspicion were connected in an instant. I wasn't shocked, I was pleased and proud that as a kid I had seen beyond the bland matter-of-fact assurances and understood it.

So now I sit in that peanut gallery and think, whatever, bring it on. The alternative is exponential growth, and it looks even more stupid.

[MrMambo]

I had always known that someday it would reach its maximum and that the resource would eventually disappear. I'we grown up with not only the word fossil-fule but also with the the words non-renewables and renewables.

I'm from Norway, and when I was a kid, we had Gro Harlem Bruntland as prime minister. She led a UN-commision that created the "Our Common Future" report back in 1987 wich was really brought the consept of "sustainable development" to the world.

Also Norway is an oil nation. And the political debate around economic issues has for a couple of decades gravitated around "What do we do after the oil".

So in fact I guess I'we been sort of peak oil aware before I discovered the peak oil movement.

However, I was ignorant to how accute the issue might be. I didn't know until a couple of years back that we are most likely very close to reaching global maximum production. Also I had not given a whole lot of thought to how dramatic consequenses might be as a result of falling oil production. Earlier I had mostly figured falling oil producion in the future would be a good thing, something that would help reduce greenhouse gass emmissions etc in a world where renewable energy sources were smothly taking over.

peakoil.com, theoildrum, energybulletin etc has opened my eyes to the complexities and risks we face in the challenge of converting the modern non sustainable civilization into a sustainable one.

However I remain forever the optimist, always looking for possible solutions always trying to figure out what sort of paths we can follow to try and solve this. I'm still convinced that we can turn this around and that we can face the conglomerate of dramatic challenges that we face, amoungst them peak oil.

I know that when experiencing crisis people quite often get their act togeather and are willing to sacrafice and work hard to do their part for the better of all. We don't neccesarraly have to descend into a mad max violent armageddon.

[vision-master]

LATOC - OMG..........

[KhanCEO]

I first learned of peak oil in Richard Heinberg's "The Partys Over". However, he didn't convince me 100%. I filed it as "Might happen". Shortly after, I read an article in Fortune Magazine with Richard Rainwater telling Fortune Magazine about James Kunstler and LATOC.

Then I read LATOC and "The Long Emergency", I filed peak oil as "Highly probable". Then I read "Crossing the Rubicon", now peak oil is filed under "We're all gonna die!"8O

[peripato]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')hat was your first reaction to Peak Oil?

[Micki]

I also came across LATOC as one of the first sites.
Had started thinking about investing in the energy sector a couple of years ago (some time before Katrina).
Dismissed it as BS at first. Later that week I think I came across peakoil.net and started following up on all I could from ASPO.
When Katrina was drawing closer I went back revisiting LATOC and spent a sleepless weekend just surfing all PO sites I could.

That weekend was also the turning point when I dropped (at least to a large degree) my consumer mindset and started listing all the things I need to get/do before TSHTF.
And I am glad I did cause I always felt that "things" don't make you happier but was caught with the "affluenca" needing to look wealthy and succesful. Now I have some more purposeful goals to work towards.