Let's burn the mothership first and ask questions later.

I know that the production of these stats and charts are the work of a dedicated creator of charts and stats, perhaps a scientist, and certainly one who believes that science will lead us all from the dark cave to the brilliant light of reason.

And I understand the mantra of the scientific community that we must know what we are facing before we can fix it, but I fear this slow moving beast, which stomps blindly on people with impunity, consoling itself with the platitude that it is helping people in the short term.

That's the problem. Short-term thinking. Everyone seems to only be concerned with keeping the oil flowing, no matter the cost. And the scientists who are putatively trumpeting the concerns of the peak oil crowd are unwittingly contributing to the downfall of humanity by advocating the go-slow approach. They would have us try to find other destructive methods to fuel our anti-nature lifestyle, to create dubious technologies to mitigate our short-sighted ruinous rush to embrace technology (think CO2 sequestration, Methane Clathrate mining and other potentially disastrous technologies), and finally they would have us believe that this is the only way, asking us not to look too far into the future.

The basis for our technological civilization is flawed at its core: perpetual growth and the injection of human values into a non-humancentric natural system. Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that nature will strike the balance, effectively killing off all but a few hundred million humans in the next two hundred years. No amount of rational thinking, strident pleading, careful individual preparation, or scientific humbug will stop this immense catastrophe.

This site has become like a club of Aeronautical Engineers holding court on the Hindenberg. While they head for their doom, they debate and trade memos and laud each other their efforts, inscribing beautiful colored charts that in fact describe their doom, but at the same time counseling calm, letting us know that they take certain measures to keep the balloon aloft. Though we all know it will all end in tears and recriminations.

You will undoubtedly ask, "So, what do you want us to do?"

Fair enough.

Make peace with your invisible sky being of choice.

All your base are belong to us.

There is nothing you can do. You are a mere 6.8 billionth of the social mass on this planet. You are but a speck on the backside of a massive survival engine that has evolved to seek the way of Paleolithic man, to survive day to day, no matter how destructive that short-term survival impulse coupled with high tech may be to future generations. Our natural inclination is to put individual over family, family over clan, clan over tribe, tribe over nation, nation over humanity. We are the selfish, thinking species and think we do. Witness this page.

So...Go on thinking. Go on chatting. Go on drawing charts. I'm going to trade my Prius for a Hummer and start drag-racing through the wilderness preserves. I hope, by speeding up the destruction of the environment, we can kill off this most perniciously self-centered species post haste.

The smoldering ruin that will mark post oil earth will be barren and wounded, its species decimated, the remnants of humanity doomed to live on the polar margins, scraping a living, learning to forget and forgetting to learn, and, with luck, the polar bears will eat those last survivors.