40 comments on Facing the Hard Truths about Energy - the NPC report, commented
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Roger,
Thank you for your thoughtful post.
I completely agree that it is essential to make the argument about Peak Oil to others. Personally, I am not one to discuss politics or religion or anything else all that controversial. But with Peak Oil, we really must become Evangelists.
I find myself trying to convince people of the reality we face rather than allow them to persist in their error, whereas normally I would not very much care what other people thought about a given subject and would rarely try to change their opinion. Why bother? But in this case, it is essential.
If people knew for a fact that oil supplies would decline worldwide at say a 2% rate ad infinitum, each individual could act rationally by reducing consumption (the vast majority of which is completely unnecessary) significantly and supporting appropriate government action (perhaps to compel those who are ill-informed or recalcitrant to do what is in their own best interest.)
Clearly we could solve the problem now, with sufficiently Draconian measures, but instead the mood is one of marginal accomodation to a seemingly temporary problem: buying the SUV that gets 15 mpg instead of 12 as if that is going to make a difference.
CLZ09,
Good thoughts, but I must respectfully disagree with the above point.
We humans are a sad lot.
Few of us act as "individuals".
We are mostly herd animals.
We go along to get along.
We insist on being part of the mainstream.
And lastly, we are not "rational".
Think about what happened with the Global Warming movement.
For the longest time, anyone who believed in AGW was deemed a crazed tree hugger.
And then something tipped over.
A critical mass was reached.
Enough people bought into the GW theory so that it suddenly became mainstream thought instead of lunatic fringe talk.
Think about Al Gore's strongest point: "The debate is over."
This is not exactly science or rational.
It is an appeal to our herding instinct, an "assault against reason" if you think on it some more.
If you're not with us, you're an outsider, one who has been cut and run off from the mainstream herd.
The Peak Oil movement is still lunatic fringe.
We don't have enough converts to be considered mainstream.
However, I think each day a few more people have the light bulb turning on in their head. For whatever reason, it suddenly hits them that the Earth is finite and after all, we never had this many people (6.5B) trying to drive SUV's across Mother Earth's rugged terrain.