The Oil Drum: Why People Disagree on Peak Oil: Part III – Our Belief Systems

Today on The Oil Drum, Nate Hagens, a former Wall Street investments manager who has an MBA from University of Chicago currently completing his PhD candidacy at the University of Vermont’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, explores the social and psychological theories and insights that come with the larger issue surrounding how individuals can deal with and the constraints on individual level behavior inside the larger picture of a plateauing petroleum supply.

Nate begins: “In the first two parts of this series, we looked at some of the factual reasons why people disagree on the timing and importance of Peak Oil: gross versus net oil production, better technology vs depletion, productive capacity vs flow rates, differing definitions of “Peak”, etc. This post will address some social and psychological reasons why the urgency of our energy situation may not be being addressed on an individual level and only at a snails pace on the governmental level. Among the phenomena we will explore are a) why we have beliefs and how they are changed, b) our propensity to believe in authority figures, c) our penchant for optimism, d) cognitive load theory, d) relative fitness, e) the recency effect, and several others. The fact is, even if the world’s energy data was transparent and freely available to everyone, it would be an open question whether people would agree on any near term action to mitigate future oil scarcity.”

Much more after the jump to The Oil Drum.