The contents below are paid advertisements. Their appearance does not imply an endorsement by The Oil Drum.
“The infrastructure of suburbia can be described as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.”
—JH Kunstler
Search The Oil Drum with Google
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Prof. Goose, Heading Out, Stuart Staniford, Nate Hagens
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Gail the Actuary, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Khebab, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Local: Glenn
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Technician: Super G
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Local
- Summer Streets a Success!
- Plan for Hydro-Fracture Drilling for Unconventional Natural Gas in Upstate New York
- Enjoying Life Close to Home: Fun Streets
TOD:Europe
- UK Energy Flow Chart 2007
- Brown pretends to be tough on Russia
- Russian gas and European energy security - a reprise
TOD:Canada
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
- Oil Megaproject Update (July 2008)
- Weekend Energy Listening: Wind Power with Paul Gipe
TOD:ANZ
Peak Oil Primers
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- Ecological Economics
- David Strahan
- Econbrowser
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- Environmental Economics
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- jeffvail.net
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Organizations
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.






GAIA Host Collective
I'm not a regular commenter here, mainly because while I'm a big fish in a small pond energy-wise in my own life, at TOD...wow...I'm utterly totally outranked.
But here I can make a bona fide comment.
Just as TOD is two years into this thing, I'm almost exactly two years into discovering the Big P.O. and having my entire worldview turned upside down upon that discovery.
I flip and turn and read and read and read. I have felt powerless and empowered at turns. Have felt optimistic at certain things I read here...and then have days when I want to rip out my thinning hair and think the world is headed down the drain. It is an enormous struggle for me, and really it should be for anybody, anyone with a critical mind.
All I can say is...The Oil Drum approaches this subject in the most rational, intelligent, factual way I have seen on this subject. At its core, this is NOT a doomer site, as Leanan said.
Now...if nothing is done about the subjects talked about here? Well...this COULD in retrospect BE a doomer site, but TOD writers do not and should not resign themselves to that, even as they do honest journalism and acknowledge that possibility as one possible outcome.
I think the crux of why this is such a valuable site is that you have energy experts with degrees longer than my arm (and indeed every limb on my body) that are not afraid to acknowledge what NO politician today, no major media outlet could ever acknowledge - we are in REAL trouble. And a few tweaks to the system will absolutely NOT be enough to maintain status quo for the long term, or perhaps even the mediumterm.
Whether we can meet these challenges or not, at least The Oil Drum is asking the right questions instead of the horribly, at times criminally misguided ones of the MSM. Which makes this site absolutely essential reading.
Thank you, and see you next year and beyond!
I'm no big fish either. I'm just a guy with a sharp pencil, a little physics and subject-matter expertise (which anyone could get by reading the right stuff and doing exercises — my degree sure didn't give me specific grounding for this) and a hard head.
Oh, and a little optimism. Like the doomers, I'm sure we've got troubles ahead. Unlike the doomers, I think they're both fixable and worth fixing.
I'm happy to see GliderGuider sharpening his pencil, and I'd like to see a lot more people doing it. We need more hard-headed optimists.