Nate, think yourself lucky you didn't choose to make a speciality of studying human behaviour (as I did myself) else you'd have had to confront this sort of ideological trash-throwing at the heart of your life-trajectory rather than on the periphery. Regarding there not being a gene for selfishness, it should be evident to the neutral observer that we have innate tendencies towards both selfishness and helpfulness, which conflict, and the resolution of that conflict has to be constantly reworked (as is the subject of so many literary works etc).

So forgetting everything you said and I said, do you think telling people the 'general' facts about peak oil is enough to effect change?

Both of us know that telling people the facts will change almost nobody. However, this phenomenon (people refusing to believe the evidence in front of them) has nothing to do with the subject matter and nothing to do with humans' supposed inability to plan for the future. Let me quote from a paper by Herbert Lin (1983). This is a college physics student describing his/her process of learning physics:

...the things I see in physics are completely different than what I would normally expect them to be... Even though I've seen it in lab, I say "OK, I'm just going to pretend it's true," and I work the problems like that...

Tell me, what does physics have to do with planning for the future? Do you see my point? Our tendency to ignore the evidence spans all human endeavor when that evidence requires us to change our belief systems. Obviously I'd put Thomas Kuhn at this point on my recommended reading list. And most importantly, belief systems are socially constructed and mediated, not "cognitive" in the "in the brain" sense of cognition. They are "in the world" cognition if you like. That is why I would argue that communicating peak oil successfully is a framing issue (see Deborah Tannen, and more recently, George Lakoff for further reading on the topic of frames).

I read so much out of my field that I'm not sure what my field is!

We need many many more people who do exactly that! BTW, Nate, have you ever heard of Lambros Malafouris? I think if he is anywhere close to being right we may find the consequences of Peak Oil to be many orders of magnitude more viscerally debilitating than any of us would care to imagine.
Somewhat akin to losing many of our extended senses while at the same time having our artificial limbs torn from their stumps. Not to mention that since it was futile to resist and we were assimilated into the borg we are now on the verge of all being tossed out of the garden of eden to fend for ourselves by the sweat of our brows. Not a happy thought for most people. So I think I can understand while so many people want to continue to try to find solutions for maintaining BAU at any cost.

http://revminds.seedmagazine.com/revminds/member/lambros_malafouris/

The mainstream approach to cognition holds that it happens in the mind and that material culture is nothing more than an outgrowth of our mental capacities. Archaeologist Lambros Malafouris is challenging this deep-seated idea with a radical new notion: the hypothesis of extended mind, which posits that material culture is not a reflection of the human mind but an actual part of it. Take, for instance, a blind man's stick. "Where does the blind man end and the rest of the world begin?" he says. "You might see the stick as something external, but it plays a very important role in the perceptual system of this person. It extends the boundaries of this human—the stick becomes an integral part of the cognitive architecture."

If material culture is an extension of human cognition, our engagement with it has actively shaped the evolution of human intelligence, Malafouris argues. For example, ancient clay tablets that allowed people to actually write down records were not mere objects, he says. Instead, they became integral adjuncts of the human memory system. The invention of such a technology "changes the structure of the human mind," says Malafouris, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge.