There are quite a few people that have a clue, but there are so many others that don't, it is sometimes hard to know to whom to listen. I've been noticing this more and more recently, particularly due to the huge deluge of chatter that goes on in newspapers, radio, television, and especially, on the Internet
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Comments 13
He lost a lot of credibility with me right then.
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The problem here is that we are so dependant on oil that we can't really get beyond the idea that we NEED oil. We need to find other ways of providing fuel.
Of course, I say this in the wake of driving 2 hours to go to the beach, driving another 2 hours to take the kids and their grandma to the airport so they can fly to Michigan...
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Actually, there is not more fuel to be found, not in the quantities that we would like to use it. Instead, it is going to be about crash conservation and curtailment, so we all reduce our dependance on oil by fifty, seventy, or even ninty percent. What that really means is imagining that our take-home income was reduced by that same percent, and then figuring out how to live on that.
Yes, I was thinking about my burning of fuel yesterday as well. A short jaunt to see Indiana IV and I burned up two gallons of gasoline, and created about $20 in economic spending/activity. But, as I've mentioned many times before, if the money wasn't spent on this, it would have been spent on something else. Which is to say that we can not do anything to stop peak oil or climate change, although we can certainly prepare in our own lives for both.
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Education about all of this has to come from somewhere...and you're right, we need a lot more people than we currently have "with a clue." :)
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Peak oil/energy is a complex topic that requires more critical thinking than laziness on the part of the public. I realize this is asking a lot of a public that barely knows who its president is or how gasoline is produced, but the problems we face are difficult.
It seems to me that The Oil Drum is focused on teaching people who are willing to learn...so, if TOD is too much for those willing to let Darwin do the work for them, then so be it.
But then again, perhaps I have drank the TOD kool-aid too. We need people "in the know" working together in a coordinated fashion...don't we?
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Something "The Oil Drum" could do would be to create a seperate web site, very clean, very simple, for the normal busy person, to get them up to speed on what is going on, with a very small selection of the best articles, that had all been edited down to managable size.
Peak oil is not really all that complex. The price of energy is going up, it will keep going up, and this will cause a massive shift in our economy, namely, high inflation, high unemployment, and a shift back to much more local living.
There are lots of other ways to boil it down, such as focusing on per capita energy, and on net oil exports (which are on the decline) and etc.
Don't get me wrong, I think "The Oil Drum" is a good idea, and I'm glad it exists, it is just not the most user friendly portal to the concept of peak oil.
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