[sirrom]

i just wanted to see how you all found out about Peak Oil so that i can get a better idea of how to spread the word about the impending doom.

For me, it was when i was bored one day,so i typed 'when the oil runs out' into google(wasn't really expecting much to come up).i look at the list of results and saw LATOC,so i clicked on that and after spending a long time reading everything on there,i looked at a couple of different sites(including this one) and now i regulary come to the site to check the latest news and i'm also preparing myself for the chaos.

so how did you find out about it?

[asdar]

I've always been into solar. Way back in 1984 I talked my father and grandfather into putting solar up on their cottages, and I keep checking up on solar.

I found the Energy Blog looking for articles and it had a link here and that's how I found it.

[hippiema1]

We watched The End of Suburbia, thinking we'd be seeing a critique of suburban development like many others we have been a part of. While the movie does point out the McMansion-Walmart culture as a morally problematic and boring life, the movie put PO in our faces. Both of us had heard about the problems we'd have with various resources, but neither of us had any idea how close we might be and neither of us had really played out all the ramifications.

In the months following our movie viewing, we've read a ton--partly to try to reassure ourselves that the people saying this were just wackos. Well--needless to say, we did NOT find that to be true....

Now we're starting to make other arrangements, as Kunstler might say.

[benzoil]

I'm a regular reader of Salon.com. In May of 2005 they had an interview with James Kunstler about his new book "The Long Emergency". It was like falling down a rabbit hole. The interview led me to the book. The book led to his web site, which led me to LATOC, the Oil Drum, and here.

What's interesting is that Salon.com is mostly a liberal politcal news site. The JHK interview was probably one of 2 PO related articles they did in 2005. In 2006, they started a new blog/column called "How the World Works", however. The author of that column is a PO believer and mentions the topic regularly now.

Given the massive changes I've made in my life since becoming PO-aware, it's a good thing (I hope!) that I wasn't on vacation the week that interview ran. I wouldn't have heard about PO until recently, if at all.

Anecdotally then, the best way to get the word out about PO is to interview authors with amusing catchphrases on liberal news sites.

[NEOPO]

One day I was looking at alternative building which led me to ecovillage/commune type websites and while I was reading on one of the forums some "hippy" said the magic words and the rest is history

I hope to meet this hippy one day and thank him/her.

It is more like a huge sink hole then a rabbit hole though.

[azreal60]

To start with, off topic, sir rom, can you please alter your sig so it isn't so long that it causes scrolling? Just change the second window to a couple words, your linky will still work.

On topic, I went to the MREA's energy fair and richard heinburg was the keynote speaker on saturday. I then read his book the partys over, and joined this site the next day.

[Gvil]

My friend mentioned Peak Oil back in 2004, googled it and since then I'm hooked. Imho we are now there.

[Cobra_Strike]

Story telling around the hunting camp fire is fairly popular among my family. I started reading books with PO as a minor back story item long ago, it was logical to me that oil would run out faster then I had been told it would.

The start of the BP re branding to 'beyond petroleum' was sort of a heads up that it was practically 'now'.

The 'now' part was what scared me so much.

[NotMyBlood]

This is an interesting/excellent question!

As the last 5-6 years have gone by, I was noticing or "feeling" that things were "out of whack". The conversations I had with friends, the look in peoples eyes, the attitude, the news, GeoPolitical events......I cant explain it, and it was a gradual realization. A gradual process that led me to feel almost "despair". I wasn't depressed, everything was fine in my life, I just started to notice how much work I was doing and how much time I was spending on "things" (that I really didnt need or have to do) and getting very little accomplished. And how complex everything was becoming, from keeping track of new technology to talking to customer service reps/machines about my cable bill, to trying to understand the broken english the middle eastern guy was speaking at the gas station. (and he was pissed at ME for not understanding) Also, I was doing research online for a sci-fi book I was planning to write. It led my to an essay on the decline and fall of western civilization. Then to Jared Diamond's Collapse, Jay Hanson's Die-off.org where I spent 2 weeks. And from there its been every piece of information I can get my hands on. I'm almost obsessed with it. Its not just "Peak Oil", its the whole - Olduvai theory. Eventaully I got to latoc and now here(peakoil.COM). got banned at latoc.


These are the isssues of our time and they are big ones. Climate Change, War, Peak Oil, Green Revoultion, Overpopulation, Technology. Will we become the jetsons or the flintsontes? Were going to find out in the next 20-25 years. Maybe sooner.

[dbruning]

Sadly my physical stature is closer to Fred than to George, and that's after dropped 14 lbs. Long ways to go still.

On the plus side, the Flintstones had those huge ribs to look forward to

[cat]

Similarly, like the orginal poster I typed the words "how long until oil runs out" into my search engine one day a couple of years ago. I was writing a letter to the editor of my local paper regarding an irritating article about how wonderful our car culture was and how we could not possibly give it up. When I wrote the letter I was thinking in terms of GW, but I made a comment about how oil was a non-renewable resource. I couldn't remember how many years of oil we supposedly had left - 100, 200 or 300, so I tried to look it up - thus here I am down the rabbit, or sink hole so to speak.

[NotMyBlood]

I wanted to add that reading books/work produced by the gentleman in the "ask the experts" section along with Kunstler and others has been eye-opening, enjoyable and important.

So, Wilma or Judy? I gotta go with Wilma......

[Rabbit]

At work I market off-road truck parts. For years I noticed a link between the price of gas and sales. The higher gas is the lower sales are. In order to try and learn more about the gas futures market I came across this site. Now it is clear to me that it is only a matter of time before we see the end of wide spread recreational use of fuel.

It is my hope that soon OPEC will admit that it can't supply additional oil. Once that happens I hope the people of the world start talking about the supply limits of oil as openly as they do global warming.

Once the world accepts that we are out of oil, I think many people will make the kind of changes that people on this board have made. I know I have cut my gas use in half. If people really knew that gas is going way up in price they just might not buy that SUV next time they buy a car. Right now the news is not doing the job of telling people the truth about the world energy situation. I believe wide spread information about the situation will being about changes faster then rising prices alone.

[Quicksilver]

I was reading an article about Ballard Power Systems around 1999 and they mentioned something about the oil running out. I googled 'world oil reserves' and stumbled upon hubbertpeak.com.

[ChicknLittle]

At the start of Iraq War II I was Googling for information about world oil supply, as it seemed that oil was a more plausible explanation than WMD's (flimsy evidence)... That led to the topic of oil depletion and peakoil.com.

[mmasters]

My mom was reading this book she found on amazon called Crossing the Rubicon. She mentioned it to me from time to time and I thought it sounded a bit wacko. Anyhow, one day she brought it up again and it hit some kind of chord with me and so I started poking around on the net and found Ruppert's website. I managed to stumble into this place while researching things further.

[benzoil]

I'd forgotten about Mike Ruppert. He kind of imploded a bit. I've never been sure if I should be thankful at some of the excellent early work he did getting the word out about Peak Oil or fearful at the "taint of conspiracy" that he brought with him.

[mmasters]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('benzoil', 'I')'d forgotten about Mike Ruppert. He kind of imploded a bit. I've never been sure if I should be thankful at some of the excellent early work he did getting the word out about Peak Oil or fearful at the "taint of conspiracy" that he brought with him.

[NotMyBlood]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mmasters', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('benzoil', 'I')'d forgotten about Mike Ruppert. He kind of imploded a bit. I've never been sure if I should be thankful at some of the excellent early work he did getting the word out about Peak Oil or fearful at the "taint of conspiracy" that he brought with him.

[steam_cannon]

I'm a Systems Analyst specializing in database systems in the work world. Debunking email scams and Urban Legends is a side hobby of mine. And geology, population, environment and energy are all interests of mine. In college I had an excellent geology professor who spent a little time getting into resource usage, depletion, environmental degradation and predicted a number of dangers the US could face such as a deluged New Orleans.

I decided I needed to purposely devote time researching the problem of exponential population growth and resource depletion, after reviewing an old book: "The Population Bomb" I picked up for 75 cents.

The original version of "The Population Bomb" is an excellent book because the timing of their predictions turned out not to be correct. So this begged the serious question, why hadn't these dieoffs happened yet? As no system can support infinite growth, I wanted to know the mitigating factors and how much longer exponential growth could last. What is the carrying capacity of the Earth? How long can the Earth support it's present population? What would be the implications of a diminishing world population be? When and how would that start?

First it turned out that the dire predictions in the "The Population Bomb" were averted mainly due to the introduction of petrochemicals that increased crop outputs, in what was a good climate at a time when there was plenty of fuel to support a functional modern economy. The petrochemicals came from non-renewable oil and natural gas supplies. Thus, the timing for a dieoff would be dependent on the availability of fuels that were running out. So getting better numbers on the availability of fuels became an important goal.

This of course lead me research oil, gas, coal, nuclear, biofuels, solar (and the rare metals required), global dimming, and climate change such as the worsening dust bowl situation in the plains states...

Along the way I came across: Kunstler, powerdown, dieoff.org, theoildrum.com, peakoil.com...

The results of this research put simply is that no system can support infinite growth and the maximum output for this system seems to have peaked. This also means the factors mitigating an earlier dieoff have also reached an apex and so the system is now winding down. This explains why the world is now experiencing demand destruction for fuel, yearly losses in food production, ethical tugs of war like food for fuel, economic instability, increased resource wars, and wide spread human habitat loss due to global climate change (further reducing the carrying capacity of our planet). And the implications of losing the mitigating factors mentioned earlier require no further explanation.