If you wait till the shortage, then it's not conservation. Why is that so hard to understand?

We had the chance to conserve. IT's now too late to do anything but prepare to adapt.

I appreciate your effort not to be ironic or sarcastic. Your struggle to keep a straight face is apparent even through the time and space that saparates us.

At this time there is still a lot of oil left and we waste most of what we use. Our ability to provide ourselves with food, clothing and shelter is not threatened; our jobs and our ability to get to them is. There is no necessary connection between our jobs and our ability to have the necessities of life. It is an artifact of our economic system. In my opinion, most of earn our living doing unnecessary work; many of us do work that would be better undone (sorry, I'm just now learning how to use semicolons).

To the extent that peak oil threatens this waste of our time and talents, it is a good thing.

I think matt is a doomer-like u seem to be
becoming? ;so saying that where he did he is saying- conservation is likey the ONLY large oil basin available & you can either conserve or have a shortage your choice.
i thought it was slick given the msm .
You may have seen his brief stint in the cnn- u were
warned- he looked very worried there & said i
think something to the effect of u don't really
want to know what i think.

I also remember his last gov. presentation on po
being given to our military & that is where he sees this going.

Does conservation imply actually cutting consumption or not?

As I interpret it, (matt simmons and others) the answer is yes. The basic idea, no doubt for public consumption and easy understanding is that cutting consumption means there is more oil in ‘reserves’ or ‘in the ground’ than there would have been if everyone guzzles away.. etc. While not untrue, it seems a bit of a strange argument, not very effective, possibly designed to prepare people for shortages, or get them used to the idea of scarcity, etc. Not very hard hitting. (I am all for a sharp reduction in all energy use myself.)

Consumption will be cut; is being cut in many places (eg. Iraq, Nigeria.) The question is how with how much pain and for whom; in times of scarcity, sharing of resources becomes a screaming issue, and things can get out of hand. Having large socio-economic class differences (eg. US vs. Northern EU, the ‘rich’ mentioned) is obviously a tinder box. I remember something about people eating cake?

As a European, I am sometimes a little surprised by the mechanistic analysis favored; size of cars -mpg-, fuels for cars, or partial replacement by mass transit; greening suburbia, etc. All are vital, of course. But they don’t leave much room for social adaption, for changes in society, rather than changes in technology (or price.)

To take up only personal transport: car-sharing, hitch hiking schemes, mobility cars (cheap rental cars that are picked up at stations or underground garages, no paperwork), free bikes, pedibus lanes (these are walking lanes for children that are policed by adults) are all easy to do, even for private people without support from the Govmnt. In CH, mobility cars and hitch hiking schemes make money. (Err some of the latter did for a little while.) So do bike rentals.

‘Da Free Markett!’ - see high price of gas and car tax etc. So it is complex..

All sharing arrangements, whether commercial, private, or Gvmt. subsidised, rest on trust. On the assumption of a cohesive society where individuals obeys the rules, are not a danger to each other. And implicitly allows leeway for the occasional transgressor to be accepted as a fact of life; the individual creepo should not be punished too harshly. If a strong authoritarian stance is required to make ‘sharing’ arrangements work, they cannot function or will ultimately collapse (see eg. USSR communism or army rebellions), because they defeat their purpose by being too wasteful in time, energy, money, etc.

Note. Mobility cars, Switzerland: http://mobility.ch/pages/?dom=6

Hi writerman,

Thanks for your comment. I like your bringing up this point -
re: "I'm not sure how we can deny the Chinese and Indians their rightful share of the pie, bigger slices."

Or course, it may be that it's not up to us, one way or the other.

At the same time, there are at least some people in those countries who are aware of the problem of jumping in line to the cliff (how else can I say it?). Let's see...the problem of pursuing the same development path. www.cseindia.org.

Sunitra Narain has done some amazing work - well worth a look, (IMHO).

Some leadership from the EU/US (and I don't necessarily mean elected leaders) (though, of course, this is ideal)...could embrace the realities of the US position in regards to energy, acknolwedge some mistakes (not to minimize the mistakes, by any means) and make some real efforts to look at the role of all stakeholders, and come up with some mitigation strategies. It's possible. That's all I'm saying.