The Oil Drum

There are many layers of the Peak Oil onion. One man who has peeled away most of them, largely out of the public eye, is Jay Hanson. Jay is the quintessential Peak Oil autodidact. After a successful career in software design, his ongoing quest for knowledge about energy, evolution and the environment culminated in a massive internet reference hub for these topics called DIEOFF.ORG. In 1997 he predicted we would invade and occupy Iraq for their oil. (link). Jay has been intensely studying and researching topics central to energy and evolution nearly full time for 15 years, (4 of which spent solo on a yacht in the Pacific). I know many of the readers of theoildrum got their first exposure to the concept of Peak Oil through Jays writings and research and were active readers of his dieoff listserv( GreyZone, Darwinian, Angry Chimp and Totoneila, to name a few).

As such, I feel privileged that Jay will be visiting Robert Rapier, myself and some friends in August to discuss his latest ideas, research and predictions regarding society in the face of peak oil. He is particularly interested in working out a 'logic' framework on the human behavioral aspects of everyday life, and believes we can parse much of our behaviour into a simple set of 'if-then' analog algorithms, evolutionarily designed, context dependent.

[editor's note, by Stuart Staniford] This is a guest post from Southsider1 who is a recovering historian. He made some comments to me once about the Black Death as an analogy for peak oil. I don't personally think peak oil is likely to be nearly as bad as the Black Death, but I thought his general insights on what happened then were very interesting.

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I'm wary of the more extreme doom-and-gloom predictions about life on the downward side of the peak. When folks like Jan Lundberg write,

It is becoming clear to more and more energy analysts that the United States of America as we know it will not endure for long.

I say, how does he know, and how can anyone know in what way a nation or a civilization will respond to a catastrophe?