235 comments on Peak Oil - Believe it or Not?
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235 comments on Peak Oil - Believe it or Not?
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The problem is that we *don't* all agree that we have a science of sociobiology. It's status as a science in itself is highly in dispute, particularly its current incarnation, evolutionary psychology. Yes, you've mentioned some psychological experiments above, but even they crucially depend on the assumption that the environments in which they are tested aren't deeply biased. Could you repeat the Milgram experiment in every time and place? We don't know, because the times and places vary wildly.
There maybe no nurture without nature, but we don't even know yet which is which.
Well, heck, I am an evolutionary psychologist, so I'll take exception with that.
There is a large, and rapidly growing, body of scientific literature related evolutionary psychology. It is butting up against the Standard Social Science Model worldview of cultural determinism that has been the main paradigm in the social sciences for about 80 years. We are in a time of academic and cultural transition from viewing humans as psychologically "natureless" (a blank slate) to viewing the brain as a set of evolved adaptations. Paradigm shifts are always full of controversy.
With respect to Peak Oil, the question posed by, I believe, Bob Shaw, "Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?" is yet to be answered. At least if we better understand our human nature, we may be able to see what we are up against, and, perhaps, how to deal with it. An incorrect view of human nature will go a long way to screwing things up further.
More info re the scientific foundations of evolutionary psychology (for those with an interested and an hour or so of free time), see:
hbes.com -- The Human Behavior and Evolution Society
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Evolutionary_Psychology
and a brief article I wrote for my students: Evolutionary Psychology and Peak Oil
http://www.drmillslmu.com/peakoil.htm
Cheers, Mike
Wow! - that is quite the peak oil reference hub!
To me, these cognitive concepts are interesting and relevant on their own, but to have a unifying principle of why they exist is so much more holistic and informative. It takes a lot of reading and/or observing animals, etc. to get the 'aha' of evolutionary biology. But it's a very powerful (and correct) lens with which to view the world. In the end (and I don't mean that literally), we have to know where we came from to know where we are going..
Thank you.
And welcome to TOD....
Nate, beliefs also have to do with the dominant social relations of production and reproduction we are embedded within, have internalized and, though no longer in our best interests, attempt to - and through various means have been and are told and trained to - perpetuate.
Juan de la O
Welcome to the forum.
You can simplify your life a lot if you remember the bull and the barbed-wire fence. I saw a cow in heat back up to the barbed wire fence, and the bull mounted her regardless of the pain or future consequences of his action.
That is what we call "marketing". That is the basis of human behavior (lizard brains) when stimulated. Unrestricted competitive behavior and actions taken based upon Blind Faith in Gods, guns, or gurus, and actions taken without thought (the yeast) are the True Evils in the world. Good luck with using knowledge to overcome marketing. Until being smart is better rewarded than being competitive, the rewards will always go to those who can gather the most resources and use them up the fastest. Gathering the most people to waste the most resources (Globalisation and Economic Growth) has been the goal of thousands of years of 'civilization'.
This human train is on a single, straight track to Hell, and it has spent most of the resources accelerating, with none left to build enough track or brakes to stop it.....
We might be able to derail it, but most of the passengers will die and the ones that are left will be without transportation.
Mike,
http://www.drmillslmu.com/peakoil.htm
Great summary. Similar to my presentation in my classes. Do you mind if I link my students to it?
Ric
Please do.... anything to get the word out.
With respect to peak oil, college students seem to be sleep walking. Instead they should be holding "peak oil consciousness-raising sit-ins," staging demonstrations, and getting very pissed at us baby-boomers for guzzling the oil as if the barrel had no bottom. We can respond with "sorry, we didn't know," but we are the generation in power now.
I will vote for virtually any politician who has the guts to utter the phrase "peak oil."
Hi again Mike,
Why do you think your students are passive about this?
Without answering for Mike, I think its cognitive dissonance. Intuitively they are hearing you tell them about a world that a social science college degree isn't going to be what they thought it was - kind of a hard pill to swallow with a smile.
Education/college, health care, transportation, etc. -there are alot of heavyweight issues that peak oil will change conventional thought on.
Thank you Nate and Perpetual Energy for responding. I'm sure you are both correct. In fact there are probably many reasons depending on the individual.
Here's my limited observation.
I have noticed a certain lack of any radicalism among today's youth in North America and I find that somewhat disturbing. When I talk to young people I find them very charming and polite, after class they will often clap and praise the teacher (I work at a college so I know this is the case ... perhaps it is anomalous to my specific school). I find them, also, to be very respectful of their parents and vice versa.
In fact all the generational tensions that I experienced when I was growing up seem not to be found now. This is class and culturally specific of course and it is from my limited observations.
On the surface this appears to be a good thing, peace and harmony. Yet the cultural implications are profound. I think one manifestation is a lack of collective social outrage.
Perpetual Energy, is the media so powerful? Perhaps it is. Many people where I work think Apple is a cool company ... it's all good at Apple. Yet no one I speak to can adequately converse on the social harm that Apple potentially does.
Nate, is the cognitive dissonance so deep that it gives one unconscious option paralysis? Perhaps so. For example, very few people dig deep enough to resolve the dichotomy created by living in an advanced capitalist state AND being an environmentalist. The debate will often take on very canned "good" capitalism (Apple) vs. bad capitalism (Chevron) polarities or cornucopian market fixing notions (the invisible hand is in harmony with Mother Earth).
Perhaps also the nature of our educational system does not create and foster adequate critical frameworks. Maybe, the so called "self esteem" movement is problematic.
Another possibility is that great wealth creates social stasis. Harold Innis argued that much change comes from the margins (ref below). Although discussing new forms of media communication that are adopted by marginalized groups to effectively challenge the centre, one could extend that argument to say that all social change comes from the margins.
Today, because of our great wealth, marginalized actors of change are pushed far outside our cultural boundaries. Very far in fact.
If this is the case, then I am afraid the doomers are correct. Social change will not occur unless the margins come closer to the centre and this, in turn, will create instability and social breakdown. TODers point out that we need stability to mitigate peak oil.
I find this topic absolutely fascinating and extremely important for the challenges facing us.
Again Nate, thank you for writing this article.
Innis Reference:
http://www.media-studies.ca/articles/innis.htm
The stundent-zombies at your college must be truly gifted in hiding their true nature if you find them "charming", polite and respectful.
Here's what happens at night, when their true nature emerges:
1. They embalm their innards with massive amounts of ethanol -binge drinking, blacking out and sometimes even dying from excessive alcoholism (1,700 college students die each year from alcohol-related unintentional injuries).
Perhaps you even noticed the recent event in South Carolina where 7 students (a.k.a. fraternity members -ding ding ding: does a bell not go off in your head?) "tragically" died in a beach house fire.
2. They immerse themselves in video games that involve maiming, killing and otherwise doing harm to fellow humans while crashing, burning and otherwise destroying the planet.
3. They dream about becoming "famous" MTV hip hop stars.
4. They claw at each other in order to get ahead and succeed in the mad capped Flattening World of Thomas Friedman -where competition for survival is not just among your campus mates, but rather with the teeming masses from India, China, Mexico, etc. who also want to live the "American Dream".
Perhaps it is due to your position as a grade-giving teacher (read that as power over life and death) that they dare not let you see the truth?
Step Back,
You forgot a few more..
They put metal into their bodies. In their tongues,on gentital portions,in their noses..and place needles full of dye into their skin....YET if a parent even slightly 'slapped' then gently they would call law enforcement upon their parents!!!
They listen to music that is NOT music..
They wear ugly clothes that can almost not be worn comfortably.
They put large speakers in the vehicles and drive to where others are and create havoc with the booming sonics.
There are more but well...they need to protest themselves for inane stupidly of the worse sort. Yet they champion it and think its cute...its not...it is degenerate.
Respectable to their parents? Hog wash!
airdale-with children like this we essentially have no future...I put it down to SoccerMomism and CouchPotatoDadism
Or a summary:
I'm old - you damn kids get offa my lawn!
(VS the respectful way one refers to local American Indians eh Airdale?)
airdale, dude, *chill*... people have been getting piercings and tattoos for millenia - check out the Celts and Gauls sometime, same thing for the Scythians and Huns. Just because you prefer neo-Roman culture doesn't mean it's superior.
Their parents have no more right to slap them than they have a right to slap their parents. It's disrespectful and the mark of a person unable to articulate their thoughts, a bit of a throwback, in other words.
Their music is music. It's punk rock, it's metal, it's hip hop, it's electronica. I think most rap really sucks, same for most electronic music. I like grindcore and metal. Sue me. I also listen to classical music and jazz.
Sagging clothes do look funny. But it's part of a culture which you can take or leave.
and so on.
Degenerate? Hitler thought the same thing about the French Impressionists and Picasso and so on. (Invocation of Godwin's Law here...)
None of this has anything to do with Peak Oil awareness amongst the myspace crew: check out this Myspace group:
http://groups.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=groups.groupProfile&group...
and profile:
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendI...
Airdale and Step Back,
You're being selective in picking examples of current youth. Those kids and their seemingly extreme behavior are what jump out at you, but they do not represent the norm, the median or the typical youth. I bet these are the ones that get burned into your retinas when you see them and they shock you, and their behavior and dress is meant to do that.
Unless you work with these kids a lot (teens through twenties) you can't really appreciate how many strengths they have. Even the high number of kids with autism and other disabilities might have the new ideas and insights we will need to get through the ungodly mess OUR generation has made by recklessly burning through the world's oil inheritance so fast.
We have no room to point our fingers at the weird behaviors of youth. There are tons of great kids with manners, self control and inner drive that will stand up when the depth of our need really sinks in (TSHTF).
Anyway, that's my 2c. There's hope out there, but you need to look with some hopeful eyes.
P.S. I'm a PO doomer too...
Step Back,
I really don't know how to respond! You seem to miss the entirety of the argument here. Why don't you respond to the meat of my argument: young people are passive, change will occur only through radical social upheaval, and that change will problematically affect the mitigation of an oil peak.
PW,
I didn't mean to be impolite. Sorry.
My point is that they are not "passive". They are actively self-destructive.
What would you have them do? Society is not set up so as to empower these young people to do anything.
This is not the 1960's anymore.
"We" should have seen the PO thing coming in the 60's. After all, Hubbert warned "us" in 1956. But no, we (I assume you are about same age as me) were too busy streaking on college campus, puffing on -but not inhaling- weed, and occasionally marching in an anti-war parade. We were "special". We were the greatest generation. "They" are not living up to our tall shadow. They are too passive. [/sarcasm]
Peace. :-)
No problem Step Back and no need to apologize. You're right it's not the 1960's anymore. The lack of activism is what gets me down.
Perhaps I should have said that many young people are politically passive or politically naive. But perhaps this is the case in all of North America I think, and perhaps for NA youth as a whole across time. I think May 1968 is a better example of political activism. Whether it was good or not is up to you to decide, but the lasting effects in France were quite profound.
A couple of corrections to your asumptions: I used to teach sociology and media criticism in university and college, but I have different career now (although I might go back to teaching as I enjoyed it very much). So I'm not developing arguments from any lofty position (like the pope ... I'm like the other guy in Nate's article) ... I'm just a regular TOD reader.
In the 1960s I was eating cheese sandwiches and watching the Mighty Hercules ... I'm a little younger than you I think!
Peace to you to man!
Calling 'us' Generation-X was prescient.
Generation-Y subconsciously realize there's not alot of hope, so why bother - It didn't really work in the 60's, and people really tried and really thought they were making a difference that time round... Can you really blame them for not being motivated - perhaps when my young flatmate tells me there's no point, 'cos it won't make any difference, he's actually the wiser.
And so Generation-Z may appropriately be the last generation of the Modern Age (or the last generation of the Fourth Age of Humanity, if you're Mayan)
--
Jaymax (cornucomer-doomopian)
Come on Piggly Wiggly give it a rest, okay? Or better, tell it to eric blair.
Give what a rest CR? I have no idea what you're talking about.
Exactly!:)
Arggggh!!!! :-)
Please CR. I wasn't being facetious when I wrote that (I think you think I was). My point is that cognitive psychological approaches have a direct bearing on social behaviour (like Nate is pointing out). Option paralysis isn't just a Gen-X Copeland thing. I think it could easily be renamed as overload and dissonance. Option paralysis isn't just about the failure to choose your breakfast cereal at Safeway because of the multiple available brands. It's more about the failure to critically anaylyze what the best breakfast cereal for your body is. It's not about choice, it's about analysis.
At the end of the day, young people, in the context of this discussion, do not seem to critically analyze society and by extension fail to appreciate the issues of oil and capitalism.
Sorry to cause that Arggggh!!!! Piggly Wiggley, I guess I was a touch out of line making a cause celebre out of what was meant as communication by yourself to Nate using the lingua franca of your profession.
While I found the Article by Nate most interesting, if slightly turgid, I had just been recovering from some of Jef fvail's convoluted mystifications. An article which, in translation, amounted to unadulterated trash. That is not meant to be a slur on you, as once one deciphers the cryptic, there is sense. Ace on the other hand was wrapping garbage in basic brown paper baffle gab. Not a pleasant experience!
BTW about young people I quite agree and they haven't changed since my youth when we expected nuclear annihilation. Very little reaction to that at the time, we just went on about our business of getting, when one thinks about it, rather useless educations.
I see my pal eric blair has reared his pugly head this morning so I better go sling a bit of mud there, as Popeye might say 'always a good thing to have a emeny about to keep one from drifting'. So best to you for now:)
------
edit:
My apologies to Ace, I had meant Jeffail in the above. Now corrected (to some degree).
Marketing is the art of mind-bending. As long as doubt is placed in someone's mind, and the issue doesn't seem to effect them personally, action is not taken.
Institute the draft for the War in Iraq and millions will march on D.C.
When gas hits $5 per gallon and the price of everything goes way up, students in general will become more active.
____________________
myspace
just wait until they can't drive their SUV's anymore, and the next day get a letter in the mail informing them how much more in taxes they owe to keep social security going.
My fear is the current youth generation knows no boundaries and cannot see more than a few seconds in front of them- you'll see a lot of them wasting their last drops of gas for unbelievably insignificant things- then their last cents of change- and their last full meals. I have no clue what they expect to do once its not there anymore.
I like not knowing.
Hi memills,
When you mention peak oil are your confreres all chirpy and bright as buttons ? All ready to view the possibilities of a world of tenure dissolve about them? Or are they very solemn and CERAious and ready to believe the peak is flat like the earth, as any over schooled idiot can plainly see?
You mention you pass this compilation,
http://www.drmillslmu.com/peakoil.htm
about PO on to your students and expect them to rush out and change the world? More likely they would rush out for a quick beer and a quicker course change.
I vote for more people whose thinking starts in the solar plexus or heart and not at the pointy part of the head.
Even after my peak oil lecture, and despite my substantial charm and moving persuasiveness (!), I still have a student or two approach me later, asking: "Is that really true?" Or, with over-confidence in a technofix: "But what about fusion? Hydrogen?." (Believe me, I hope their optimism will turn out to be justified...)
Near my office door I have the Peak Oil Poster, as well as other scary looking supporting graphics. In past two years that it has been there, I have yet to be approached by a student with any questions or comments about it.
Well, one student did talk about forming a Peak Oil campus group, which I encouraged. Never heard back from him.
"Cheers," Mike
Help! help! Au secours! First Piggly Wiggly says I Gibber, now you indicate I am trying to make communication points the hard way. What to do?
By the word confreres, I mean your professional associates, the teachers, instructors , professors, those guys, the ones that want to be, or are, locked on to the university gravy trough ... tenure. Hmm did I spell that right? tenior,.. tensor,.. tennis? Anyone, anyone?
Not much good a doctor saying to the patient "Chum you are terminal and about to be pushing up daisies now what besides paying my bill are you going to do about it?"
Me I would go for a beer but first fire that joker:)
And I'll just say you are a sock puppet of Airdale.
Airdale shows up and so do you.
and now you show up all dressed in argyle:)
WOW! Thanks for the link. Dr. Mills has done a an awesome job. Leanan, can you add this link to the "Peak Oil Primer" list of links? Looks like another Defcon 1 or 2 to me =)
Hi Mike,
I think the notion of cultural determination began to ebb quite some time ago.
When I used to teach sociology to college students, I always presented the various theories with acknowledgment to the interaction between nature and nurture. That's how the text books in the early 90's presented it and it seemed reasonable to me. So I think there really isn't a debate here at all. It's been the standard normal way of social science discourse for that past 25 years or so.
Personally, I think that an exclusive reliance on cognitive models to explain human behaviour is somewhat lacking.
"Magical thinking" has a role in this debate (an illustrative role).
Check out the "magic diesel" story from Zimbabwe (ref below). We can explain that from a cognitive perspective using one of Nate's points (Mr. Mugabe sends his advisers to the witches rock thereby legitimizing the claim), or we can look at it from an sociopolitical perspective (rampant corruption has induced incompetence), or a cultural perspective (there is a history of belief in witchcraft). Or an interaction of all three.
Since the example is extreme, it throws into relief the multiplicity of ways one can view human behaviour. Each analysis is correct in its own way.
At the end of the day I'm uncomfortable latching onto a single theoretical framework to explain people's behaviour, but perhaps that's not really being supported here.
Having said all that, I did enjoy the article very much. Thank you Nate.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article2748936.ece
I'm aware of work in support of the idea. However, I suspect that the "Standard Social Science Model" is a strawman.
http://bostonreview.net/BR23.2/berwick.html
Poppycock! Denial of nature is nothing but a kind of religious belief, like denial of evolution. Our genetic nature has been proven time and time again yet the creationist...err, I mean nurture nuts just will not accpet it.
There was the Minnisota Twins study by Bouchard, there was the Stanley Milgram studies, there was the Stanford Prison experiment, and hundreds of others. The Milgram studies was re-done in Germany and several other places with the same results.
Ron Patterson
"Our genetic nature" is a meaningless statement. We lack a relation that maps a stretch of DNA to any interesting cognitive characteristic.
Almost all of these studies have been replicated in the social environment that is being blamed for Peak Oil doom. This does not invalidate the experiment---it merely makes it impossible to distinguish a cultural cause for the result from a genetic cause, whatever that might mean. Because the latter has not yet been made meaningful, it is not a testable hypothesis to say that the Milgram experiment has something to do with our "genetic nature."
Mandos,
What you say is partly true --about not being able to directly map from a stretch of DNA encoding to a particular cognitive attribute.
However, there is no denying that the human brain is an organ fashioned by evolution just as are our eyes, mouths, opposable fingers, etc.
Our cognitions all arise within the evolutionarily defined lizard, limbic and cortical shells. (Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny --if that short statement about biological destiny rings a bell for you. Or was it the other way around?)
Yes, but "fashioned by evolution" is no more scientific a statement than "fashioned by divinity". If we're going to construct claims for the origins of our current predicament, and, perhaps, advice on how to deal with it, we have to be precise about these things.
For a number of characteristics to do with human cognition, it is hard to come up with a strict adaptationist story, much as Pinker et al. would like to have us believe. The ability to map from a selective pressure to cognitive characteristic is almost as hard as the mapping from DNA. There's no reason to think, for instance, that most of the details of human language stem from any interesting selective pressure.
In particular, it's very hard to say what aspects of our "lizard" brains actually dominates our "cortical shells." You don't get the characteristics you *need*, you just get characteristics by accident, and they may or may not help, and rarely in predictable ways.
Mandos,
I'm not sure you are ready for the truth.
I don't think you can handle the truth.
If you can, there are books out there about the latest in neuro-physiology. We are not what we think we are.
Example.
"I WANT THE TRUTH!"
"YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!11!!"
The point, I'm afraid, is that this begs the question: that someone knows The Truth. The problem with neurophysiological data is that, well, some of it is very nice science, but it still offers no reliable way to separate causes from effects, and without that, it's impossible to make any interesting or meaningful statements about "What We Are" vs. "What We Think We Are."
Even the most obvious case, language, for which almost every child born is born with the same capacity for acquisition and no more---well, even there we don't have a reliable reason to say that "it's encoded in DNA."
There's many slip betwixt the cup of phylogeny and the lip of ontogeny.
I was making a mocking allusion to an American movie starring Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, "A Few Good Men". (One good woman, Demi Moore also appears in it.) What country do you hale from Mandos?
Canada, actually, though temporarily (?) living in the USA. Yes, I know the allusion. That's why I quoted the trial scene.
We will soon be able to map DNA sequences to cognitive characteristics because the rate of advance of DNA sequencing and microfluidics device advances is so fast that DNA sequencing and testing costs are dropping by orders of magnitude.
Once we can affordably collect DNA sequence information on hundreds of thousands of people and compare both their cognitive characteristics and DNA sequences a lot of connections will pop out.
And how much is epigenetics?
(My vote is more effect of epigenetics than DNA)
Precisely. And even worse, if you were to be able to find all the DNA variations in a population, that just means you have an exponential search space of potential cascading biological pathway variants each which could account for variation in phenotype.
That doesn't mean that you'll find *nothing*, it just means that you won't find *enough* to make Deep Impressive Statements about the suckitude of human genetic nature.