Fucking Windows 7 and Google Desktop screwed me out of two evenings web time. Oh well.
Bakustra wrote:
Fuck you. Fuck you in your eyes, in your mouth, in your nose, and in your ears. Fuck you in your malfunctioning long-term memory. Fuuuuuck yoouuuu.
I was agreeing with you just posts before, and now you presume that I'm disagreeing with you. I will say this: you are defeatist because practically every other post from your fingers (counting from before your sabbatical) consists of "we're all doomed! doomed I tell you!" interspersed with attempts to explain various problems facing the world to people. Your approach is something that I, as somebody concerned about most of these same problems, despise utterly. It would frankly be better for the world if you kept your mouth shut and fingers away from keyboards.
Your approach actively denies that people can do anything to halt the course of various ongoing problems. This is because you claim, "we are doomed, and there is nothing anybody can do". Well, you base this on the apathy of the average person. How do you think the average person will react? They will most likely disregard you, remaining apathetic. How else will changes be made, if the average person is not convinced? (Well, there is always totalitarianism {*snicker*}. Good luck establishing an army of Green Shirts to oppress the average person "for their own good".) How will the average person be convinced, if the only voice telling them about this tells them that they can't do anything about it?
Because they can't. It's just THAT simple, and I speak from experience. If you're referring back to posts before I took a year sabbatical (down to depression from my job and barely making ends meet, so I invite anyone else on this board to come out with this tiresome meme of me ENJOYING the prospect of an even shitter life than I had last year) then you must also know of the ones where I mentioned trying to educate the people in my local parish, prior to the worsening situation and more doomer outlook brought on by 2008, and even before I moved to my present job. I didn't come out with "By the way, oil is running out. It's
Mad Max for your kids, sucker!" at the start at all. I was using Campbell, Leggett, Deffeyes and Energy Bulletin pieces on the matter as source material. I talked with family, friends, really anyone who I knew and deemed would actually listen. My parents have always handwaved it off, I never managed to get to do a proper presentation at the village hall (and anyway, I moved not long after) and other people either respond with blank faces or total apathy/incredulity. I've talked to people on the dole when I was working for charity and my ex who is in her third year of physics at the University of Oxford. The former tended to not give a shit, or think me crazy, the latter at least had
heard of what I was talking about (she was secretary for the Fairtrade Society at Oxford and a big climate change follower), but, bless her, she trotted out the same "solutions" that the media believe in: hydrogen economy, EVs, biofuels, "we'll find more oil", "technology will save us".
Do you have
any idea how soul destroying it is to be Cassandra (but not in the rape way) and have even more intelligent people you respect dismiss any and all claims made? It's not even the bigger problems either, like a potential export pitfall which no one can do anything about. It's things like the idea of oil running out or even harming the economy, those base ideas aren't enough. If you can't understand that oil is finite and the most important commodity on Earth, then how do you go on to tackling the issue? People don't do things until they know
why they're doing it, and comprehend it to boot.
There is also the matter of convincing the more informed. Your approach turns people away because of said apocalyptic, fatalistic, outlook. They would normally be willing to hear you out and potentially change their way of life. However, your rhetoric turns them away and they become cynical about your posts, as they become the same thing over and over again. Meanwhile, you have the temerity (though you do not recognize it as such) to bitch about how people just won't listen to you. Well, nobody likes a lecturer, but nobody likes a glum bastard either, and you manage to impressively be both. Now, if you manage to put on a cheery face and make subtle suggestions rather than "a full plate? you're why kids are starving in Africa!" and still get that same response, I understand. However, you are still in a public forum. You are talking to people, making persuasive arguments. I can only recommend, but hopefully I have made myself clear.
Crystal, but you're wrong about my approach (I've only been a real doomer since late 2008 with the credit crunch, and I've never gone as in-depth or as radical in real-life as I have on here, if only because you get absolutely nowhere with endless charts and worst case scenarios). And you're wrong in thinking people can prevent this from happening. It's already too late. If we were going to fully mitigate PO at least, we should have started when Carter was on the throne, several years before I was even born. The reason I see more alarm in the situation now, is because the credit crunch (which I somewhat expected in 2007) and the more up-to-date data on oil production, exports and its alternatives, makes it even less likely that anything but a command economy and a crash in consumption will have an impact. And as we can see, one such crash has already happened as oil took too much of the GDP up. People need to consume, to drive and to use oil to produce any alternatives. How can you switch to a bright, shiny future when no one WANTS to be frugal, nor can one produce a new economy without using oil in the first place?
If you want to be a real doomer, look at the far more self-evident, intuitive and supported theory of climate change, and how even with governments acknowledging it and many optimistic scientists not selling
2012 scenarios as a reason to change our ways, we've still done sweet fuck all to mitigate it. And public opinion, at least over here, is not as pro-climate change science as it was this time last year, for obvious reasons.
You need people to take drastic action now, and stick with it, not asking questions. It's not happening, and you're deluded if you think it will happen so long as an equivalent of the American Dream exists for people to strive for using BAU.
mr friendly guy wrote:I am less worried about energy usage since nuclear can solve that issue (whether ENOUGH countries adopt it is another matter). Even with petrol people have suggested solutions.
Nuclear does nothing to solve the liquid energy crisis. It only helps with baseload power for electricity, of which most nations have adequate amounts of for the time being. Even were it to be used, the lead times, capital/credit costs and requirement to totally replace the motor fleet we have today makes the idea redundant for attacking PO. We're talking about the potential loss of all major exports within the next two decades, and that's assuming fairly steady decline rates geologically speaking. You simply cannot make nuclear, or renewables, dent the market in that time.
Additionally, oil is not used just for energy. It is a major agriculture input, and while you can use Fischer-Tropsch and other techniques for synthetic production of said inputs, they are more expensive and need to be scaled up.
Consider it this way: why do we worry about gold being so rare when there are billions of tonnes in the ocean just waiting to be retrieved, along with other rare metals we could use? The answer is this is an exergy crisis, primarily to do with liquids. So long as we have a main sequence star in the sky, there will never be an energy crisis, just as we will never run out of oil (most will stay in the ground as it'd be cheaper to burn asphalt than dig up some of the worst grades out there). In fact, just this week ConocoPhillips have said they're not investing in any new exploration, finding it easier to turn a profit by consolidating their current business and improving efficiency. An oil company that
isn't looking for oil because it's too pricey? Doesn't make sense to most people.
