You're right too about the politics of the whole thing. It's not as if we can measure or quantify it. Here at TOD we've had so many models, graphs and numbers, which are used to explain the physical nature of Peak Oil. How much have we really got, where and for how long etc. We're measuring the past, now and trying to measure the future. That is hard enough to do even though we're dealing with the physical world. But politics is far harder to understand in many ways.

Individual human beings are hard to understand and lots of them together seem to be even more difficult to understand. What concerns me about much of the politics is not partisanship or mere sectarianism, or Left and Right, or Republican or Democrat. These are essentially labels we use in order to define social reality as we perceive it.

What concerns me in this respect is people who appear to believe their own political rhetoric to the point of fanaticism. Such people exist across the spectrum and they scare me. Factor in "religion" "faith" "fear" and our collective, emotional response to war; and one has got dangerous brew on the boil at the moment.