by Windmills » Sun 01 Apr 2007, 16:38:05
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JasonHam', 'I')ts why Peak Oil and Peakers are consider part of the lunatic fringe . Just lump your "civilization coming to an end" talk in there witht the Rapture, Y2K, Nostradamus, and the boogie man. Peakers are convinced that they are right and that they somehow know more than the majority of people and governments. Nothing can save us from the desctruction that is about to occur, just in a few years. And in a few years it will be a few years more, and so on and so on. Just wait !!! Its right around the corner!! The total descrustion of humankind. People wont have any running water, they will be killing each other for a cheeseburger!! Nothing is going to work!! The Alternatives, new sciences, conservation is all a waste of time!! Just go ahead , buy a cabin in the woods, with a stockpile of shit and.....pick your nose.
A great many people haven't even heard about peak oil. I think that almost definitively points to a person who is peak oil aware as knowing more than the majority of people.
Many people haven't a clue about risk analysis, either. They don't know how to interpret it, much less make rational decisions based on the results. Just because worst case scenarios are put forth doesn't mean that every peaker believes in some kind of apocalyptic doom as being the only possible future. There are is a continuum of possible outcomes and each person assigns their own individual probability to each.
Then you have people who believe that hydrogen is an energy source and that "sustainable growth" isn't an oxymoron. Most people subconsciously believe in infinite growth on a finite planet. This group includes a lot of people, and that would indicate again that people who have studied peak oil do know better.
Many of the regulars here have spent a great deal of time reading, studying, and arguing or discussing peak oil and its related subjects. The years of doing this have coalesced their thoughts and given them certain outlooks and lenses through which to evaluate information. A number of them have already explored many topics deeply enough to come to reasonable conclusions. As a result, when ignorant newcomers stumble upon the site, they tend to be met with a range of sometimes blunt and brief yet succint responses that leave novices unsatisfied. The novice comes here filled with unfounded and ignorant ideas and propaganda. Defensiveness, derision and disbelief are natural responses to being suddenly presented with the idea that much of what you believed is a lie.
I think a better approach is to ask questions and present your ideas specifically, probably one at a time, and with more detail. Perhaps an even better idea is to shout less and read more. If you bother to read the articles and posts here, you can see a huge array of subjects discussed in detail.
Another place that novices get tripped up concerns the important distiction between what could be done and what will be done. That point can hardly be overstated. What could we do to mitigate our problems? It's easy to conjure a utopia built on workable ideas. But there is a gulf between what we could do and what we will. Given how short-sighted, lazy, and greedy humans can be, how much faith should we put in humans playing their cards perfectly? We could have ended poverty and hunger and many other social ills. But we haven't. We have the means, but we don't use them. The same lack of will and self-sacrifice plagues the responses to peak oil. We already have alternatives on the market for personal transportation. Are we using them as much as we should? No. Could and will. And don't forget the clock is ticking. It's not that we couldn't build a million of these or those, but rather, will there be the time once your country finally realizes that oil production is in undeniable trouble? We could have dealt with global warming in a rational manner 20 or 30 years ago. Did we? What did we actually do? What are we doing now? We're going to wait. We'll wait until the fire is at our doorstep. The problem is that not every crisis can be solved at the last minute. So it is with global warming. And so it will be with peak oil. Sometimes humans have to plan ahead.
So it isn't that many here have no faith in all the proposals that have been offered. They may just lack faith in people caring to implement them until it's too late. So far, they're dead right.