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how i became a peak oiler
barry stoll, Blogspot
i started where most folks in the last couple of years did – with kunstler’s long emergency.
my god, were the things he was saying true? it was such a bleak vision of the future, but the way he laid it all out seemed pretty reasonable to me. i had to find out more, get other points of view. specifically, i needed someone to logically defeat the peak oil argument to my satisfaction so i could roll over and go back to “sleepwalking into the future.”
so i hit the internets. every day i read whatever google could give me on the subject. soon i had a few new sites added to my favorites, with names that sounded both scary and boring at the same time: energybulletin.net, theoildrum.com, lifeaftertheoilcrash.net.
most people writing about the subject seemed to think some version of the long emergency was going to happen, it was just a question of when and how bad it would be. opinions ranged from pessimistic to slightly-less-pessimistic.
i found plenty of peak oil “debunkers” too, but couldn’t find many reasons to buy their arguments and found lots of reasons not to. the arguments against peak oil came in 3 basic flavors:
1) quibbling over the timing: “you told me i was going to die, but i keep waking up alive every day; therefore, i will never die.”
2) economists who weren’t taught in business school what “finite” means: “you don’t understand supply and demand – shortages of this finite resource will drive up the price, which in turn will pay for new discoveries and extraction methods of this finite resource.”
3) american technology will save us: “we’re the greatest god-blessed country in human history, and when we roll up our sleeves to make cars that run on water, then by gum, we’re gonna do it!”
each of these contain pretty obvious mistakes in reasoning, and it turned out many of the loudest “debunkers” were employed by oil companies or think tanks funded by oil companies.
to be at all persuasive, a writer only has to do 3 things: write well, be logical, and don’t be a paid propagandist / press release writer / think tanker. most writers on peak oil (and related topics) that did this for me tended to be on the bleak end of the scale, even as they offered survival tips and cheerful sarcasm. over time i began recognizing names and knew who i wanted to read – richard heinberg, bill mckibben, dmitry orlov, dale allen pfeiffer, jeffrey brown. there were even “regular” people with blogs & websites that had enough interesting and well written things to say that they became part of my weekly reading diet too – sharon astyk, john michael greer, matt savinar. i liked kunstler’s clusterfuck nation blog so much that i’d sometimes even skim through the flame-war comments section.
over the next few months i put a whole new world of unhappy concepts into my brain – the olduvai theory, overshoot, die-off. i learned more than i ever thought i would care to about oil discovery and production. i stared at hundreds of graphs on the oil drum until some of them actually started to make sense.
one day i had read enough to start recognizing the clichés – movies with the word “crude” in the title, oil spokesmen saying “the stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones” – and i knew something had changed.
i understood the inside jokes. that meant i was “in.”
i kept reading, and i came to my own theory-of-everything which i refine daily.
more about that later…
(25 May 2007)
Author barry stoll writes:
i wanted to write about what it’s like going from a “normal” person to a daily reader of websites like energybulletin.net – how you start to recognize bloggers’ names, stale arguments, and cliches on both sides of the debate.
To All The Geeks, Gamers, And Non-Attention Payers
Randy White, Lawns to Gardens
Yo kids.
I doubt you will ever read this warning because you are either too wrapped up in Warcraft, Halo, or some other shoot ‘em up game with ultra-realistic bloody graphics to care. I mean, don’t get me wrong… I’m super stoked about the new Transformers movie that’s coming out as well (which may teach you about Energy, since that’s what the robots are fighting over).
The fact is – you are woefully unprepared for the very real and bloody video game coming your way, which includes more guts and gore than you can ever imagine. Man, how cool will it be when you get to not only feast your eyes on the very real world scenario of people shooting one another in the streets – but that you might actually get to truly fight for your life? Wow. How rad that will be.
You see kids – while you are busy playing online games and watching movies (yes, I watch movies too), there is a really messed up situation in the world you need to pay attention to right now. Your very REAL life (the one you don’t get to start over) now depends on you paying attention to what I’m about to tell you, so listen up.
1) Your video game units are powered by energy
2) The world is about to explode in a big firefight over the earth’s remaining energy (it could even be nuclear war)
3) Re-read the intro paragraph
(16 May 2007)
Contributor Randy White writes:
I no longer believe we have time to prepare everyone for a smooth transition during Peak Oil. I will continue to do my best to educate as many as possible before the first oil shocks hit.
Denial
Gregory Jeffers, Mentatt
Denial. A powerful force, that. Einstein once famously remarked that: “compound interest was the most powerful force in the Universe” (of course he was referring to the exponential function, the most common representation of which is known as compound interest). Perhaps it is. I’m gonna go with denial.
Denial shapes our politics and policies, our parenting, our planning, our view of the future, and our recollection of the past. Denial shapes our relationships (a second marriage, after all, has oft been said to be the triumph of hope over experience) with our spouses and lovers, our families, our friends and co-workers. Without it there would be many days that many of use would be unable to cope. Denial has its positive attributes. But denial of the magnitude of our (think you and your family) dependence on oil, natural gas, and coal and of the CERTAINTY that, at some point, we will deplete these resources is not one of these. And it is a certainty – probability = 1.00. Not up for debate.
The lead story for all of 2006 and 2007 in the mainstream media has been energy (prices). Let’s connect the dots, shall we?
…I have 2 young sons. This issue will likely be settled in its entirety within their lifetimes. However, this progression lends itself to a bell chart, with the maximum excess deaths over births occurring sometime around 2030 – a mere 23 years from now. In case you think I have flipped my lid, this is not an original line of thinking. Several excellent white papers have been written on the subject and I am merely boiling down the salient points here.
Here comes the denial. I can feel it. You think : “SOMETHING WILL SAVE THE DAY”… Bio-fuels, hydrogen, nuclear power, tidal power, hydro, wind, prayer, little green men… Sorry, even when taken together, these energy sources/sinks will supply no more than a small fraction of the BTU’s we get from fossil fuels (guess what percentage of American voters know; a: what BTU stands for, and b: what measurement BTU represents?)
(24 May 2007)
Gregory Jeffers is a “Wall Street veteran, professional investor, and CEO of boutique investment firm for real estate and securities. Thomas Jeffers & Co., Real Estate, LLC and G.T. Jeffers & Co., LLC a SEC registered broker/dealer.”
Awakening to the Threat of Excessive Material Consumption
Leonard Poole, What Happens Next?
There are signs of a new awakening in post-industrial society. Increasing numbers of us are recognizing that the encouragement of over consumption of material goods is a fundamental problem for humanity. The belief that continual growth in consumption is essential for our well-being is now being called into question. Annual spending on marketing in excess $450 billion however continues to fan the flames of consumption-oriented living.
…As society begins the movement toward a lower consumptive lifestyle it will have economic consequences. There will be difficult times as communities adjust to a new reality. Relocalisation of our economies will be challenging. However, it will be exceedingly more so if we delay facing up to the ultimate reality that we cannot continue to increase material consumption. That is clearly a physical impossibility. The sooner we accept this fact, the easier the transformation will be.
(21 May 2007)
