 | Jamais Cascio: Peak Oil vs. Global Warming | The Oil Drum | Peak Oil and Economic Growth: Where Do We Go From Here? |  |
The contents below are paid advertisements. Their appearance does not imply an endorsement by The Oil Drum.
| Jamais Cascio: Peak Oil vs. Global Warming | The Oil Drum | Peak Oil and Economic Growth: Where Do We Go From Here? | |
k Nation (Jim Kunstler)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
I guess 'scared white guy' labels me pretty well. I started becoming peak oil aware in early 2006, and although I've made a lot of little household changes to mitigate coming problems, I've been very cautious about making changes to my investments (401k & IRA). I am overweight energy, particularly in oil services, but this level of hedge is not really proportionate to my level of confidence that big energy problems are coming soon. I don't really know what's holding me back. I guess it's very hard to pull one's self out of what Kunstler calls the 'consensus trance.'
A question to those who have hedged with a robust Plan B:
It occurred to me that at some point a Plan B will turn into a defacto Plan A if planning for a post-peak world becomes one's primary blueprint. Even if you expect that a near peak is a foregone conclusion, do you then hedge that expectation with a new Plan B in case by some miracle the cornucopians turn out to be right?
As a product of my times, I am a techno-cornucopian at heart but I am preparing for the worst and preparing for the best simultaneously.
As Dickens famously put it,
"It was the best of times and the worst of times."
My first priorities are physical hedges of the basic requirements to not only survive but to thrive in a post-peak environment. I think moe is imparting some excellent observations on financial hedging but as he indicated, financial hedges are only part of an overall hedging strategy. One cannot eat digital money or specie and one must be nimble to escape the just-in-time-collapse of financial structures.
IMO we are entering into terra incognita at the end of an age here.
We have scenarios of what the end-game might look like but
no one can predict the twists and turns of how it will play out.
I am reminded of a sticker a student had plastered on her laptop:
"Blessed are the flexible for they shalt not get bent out of shape"
"It was the best of times. It was the worst of times."
A Tale of two Crises..