The Oil Drum

When I read James Howard Kunstler's (JHK) book The Long Emergency, it had a profound impact on me. I had been aware for many years that "running out of oil" was a serious matter. After all, I took on the challenge of peak oil in my graduate thesis in 1995. But my focus was more on finding a source that could replace oil as it ran out. Reading The Long Emergency was the first time it really hit me that I was missing a lot of key pieces of the picture.

ARE WE ADDICTED TO OIL?

An advertisement for BMW cars -and freedom, and power, and sex, and status.... (Click to enlarge)

This is a guest post from First Talosian, the senior member of the planetary expedition force from Talos. I am posting the correspondence as we received it, unedited. (there are spelling and grammatical errors). In it he describes his culture's perspectives on Earth's history and future with particular emphasis on our energy and ecological intersections. The graphics were added by me after reading his letter.

First Talosian of Talos

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.