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71 comments on Conspiracy or Stupidity: The Trouble With Numbers
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71 comments on Conspiracy or Stupidity: The Trouble With Numbers
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I think you've hit the nail on the head. I'm a scientist, I relate to facts and figures (although I've always been sceptical of "models" on the basis that any model predicts the population it was based on, at that time it was based on, may be useless otherwise). Pollies of course deal in perceptions and electorate concerns.
Lately I've been reading stuff in the letters to the editor column which concerns me. A couple of people claim there are hundreds of capped wells in south west Qld and all we have to do is uncap them and ..... My concern is how to counter them with facts and figures. And then I remind myself that NO figures will convince people if they don't WANT to be convinced.
So how do we give people "graphic, real-life examples that they can relate to at the gut level"?
Show them stories about North Korea.
"This is a small country which relied on imports of fossil fuels to keep itself going. But then..."
Good example. North Korea lost their fossil fuel imports and things worked fine..... once enough people died.
And then they started lobbing missiles over the Sea of Japan and making loud noises underground and things got better again....
Well, the actual cause of their famine was the same as Haiti, basically.
Haiti said, "oh look, we're growing so much food, we need charcoal to cook it with!" then cut down all their forests. Then came rains, and there were no trees to hold the water in the soil, so the topsoil washed away in landslides and... people starved.
North Korea said, "oh look, we can't run tractors and have no fertiliser. Let's just cut down trees and plant more!" Then came rains, and... same deal.
They could have just done more crop rotation, green manure crops, given people private plots of land to till and sell the surplus, planted more trees to encourage local precipitation, and so on and so forth. Instead they went all Pol Pot and drove the people into the countryside to hack at the ground at gunpoint. Which apart from being barbarically inhumane was abominably stupid.
So really the cause of North Korea's famine was not peak oil, but bad husbandry of the land. Peak oil was a catalyst, not a reactant in the equation. So the real lesson is not that peak oil makes people starve - it doesn't - but that peak oil makes people desperate and stupid. That's the real lesson of North Korea's experience.
Which is another way of saying that North Korea's famine is the consequence of poor management of natural resources. Global Peak Oil seems to be but one of the many glaring examples that no modern society today is much better at managing these resources than the Haitians or the North Koreans.
Well, they're different things.
I mean, if you handle it well, you can keep getting food from the land for thousands of years. It's a renewable resource. But if you take up the fossil fuels any faster than in a few hundred million years, then you're depleting them faster than they can replenish.
So you can't really fault people for bad use of fossil fuels, if you use them at all you're using them badly.
The land's a different thing. We also have many examples of people using the land for centuries, good examples we can follow. We have no such examples with fossil fuels. So that bad husbandry of the land takes real, genuine effort at being stupid.
Basically, I believe you can't do it until the time is right. The magnitude of the problem is beyond the ability of politics to address - people have to change their life philosophy (simplistically consumption is good) and their life styles. On the positive side, the politicians have also lost the ability to hide the effects of insufficient oil supply. Demand destruction has begun to drive the vast societal changes that reduced energy use and sustainable lifestyles require. For example, if we were not at (or approaching) peak oil and natural gas would there be any chance of reducing CO2 emissions? People are experiencing real pain which tends to clear the mind. Perhaps the time is right for reasoned arguments to work. Of course, a city planner in my community recently suggested reducing bus service because of high diesel costs.
From my American perspective, it has been very interesting reading about the attempts of the Australian political system to address the Murray-Darling Basin situation. Tough situation. Good Luck.