The concept of peak oil just doesn't "stick" in people's minds.

I first brought it up in 1988 in high school. We were having a physics lesson all about the internal combustion engine. The teacher said there were 500 million cars or something in the world. I said, "But they all burn oil."
"Yes."
"What happens when it runs out?"
"We can use hydrogen."
"Where do we get the hydrogen from?"
"Natural gas."
"Why wouldn't we just burn the natural gas? Why bother making it into hydrogen? And what about when the natural gas runs out?"
"Well, we can electrolyse hydrogen and oxygen from water, but that's a chemistry lesson. Anyway the oil will last for centuries."
"Will it? How much do we have?"
"I don't know."
"If you don't know how much we have, how do you know we have enough for centuries?"
"We have to get back to the class."

It stuck with me. Only this year did I get a driver's license - a condition of having a family, unfortunately. It always seemed a terrible waste to me.

Likewise, three years ago I was talking to a friend about his huge mortgage, and he said, "but that's okay, because prices always go up, so if it gets too much we can sell."
"What if prices drop?"
"What? Prices can't drop."
"Why not? The price of other things goes up, goes down, that's how an economy works. And they can't jump up forever, they used to be three years' wages, now ten, where to from here? Twenty years' wages? Fifty? Eventually the one richest guy in Australia will own every house in the country, nobody else will be able to afford them. So at some point the price will drop."
"But they can't drop."
"Why not?"
"Because then we'd be fucked."
"Hmmm."

Now, they've not dropped in Australia the way they have in the US, but in many places they've plateaued and in others dropped slightly. Where we used to see 75% sell after 30 days on the market, now we see 40% sell after 90 days. So the only reason prices aren't dropping heaps is that people just aren't selling.

Things like climate change and ozone depletion, these are not really foreseeable to a layman. You have to know the science. But things like having a debt 300% your GDP and eventually going bust, housing bubbles bursting, resource depletion - these are all common sense.

But people don't like to talk about them. A thought I had recently was the people saying, "well of course the Federal Reserve Chairman has to say these positive things, if he said negative things that could hurt the economy." The thing is, if the economy really were strong and stable it wouldn't matter what anybody said about it. I mean, if someone walks up to my tomatoes growing brightly on the vine and says, "they're doing badly" - that person's words have no effect on the actual growth. The only reason I need to fear their words is if they're true.

So people think that the economy is weak, and if we speak about that it'll burst the bubble and everything will fall apart. What we have then is an implicit agreement to pretend everything's okay and we can go on like this forever. We have to go on with the class, and things can't change because then we'd be fucked.

"Lalalalala I can't hear you!"