I'm with you RonMN; people tend to equate agreement with their policy preference as evidence of intelligence.

Let's remember how the "intelligence" facet of this debate began. It was pointed out that PO.com's members are disproportionately liberal and leftist, as proven by Aaron's demographic data.

For some reason, then, it appears that, on average, liberals are more interested than conservatives in PO theory. Liberals are disproportionately attracted to joining this site, more interested in discussing PO, and more likely to believe in the theory.

The question is, What accounts for this disparity? Don't you think that question is worth investigating? Intelligence must have something to do with it. Or some aspect of intelligence, such as curiosity or social consciousness.

Most of the state of the world today can be laid at the feet of conservative policies. You can hardly claim that the Greens have been running the world.

But many of us maintain, with considerable evidence on our side, that these conservative, pro-business, pro-growth, pro-war policies have been irrational and stupid and that their failure is becoming manifest and may even be fatal.

Thats pretty easy actually. A sizeable chunk of liberals think that they can use the concept of Peak Oil to move policy agenda items. Things like urban renewal, light rail, more efficient cars, lower greenhouse emissions, mass transit, opposition to large scale automobile priority projects, etc (I could go on for a very long time.).

My opinion is that these folks don't really quite believe that Peak Oil will do what is advertised as far as crash-n-burn, but that the scare factor is seen as useful.

This neither requires nor excludes intelligence.



It wouldn't really make any difference had the folks been liberals in charge at this moment. In the end, the US has to choose between a 10mbpd future, and a 20+mbpd future with Resource Wars. There aren't a handful of Democrats in office that would ever vote to create a 10mbpd future. Just ask yourself, earlier in Bush's term when we had achieved a slightly negative growth rate, were the liberals chearing, or were they using that as an indication of failure. Liberals in the US are fully committed to eternal growth.

Now, I'm not saying that the current set of Resource Wars aren't the responsibility of the conservatives, we get credit for both the bad and the good in that regard.

Forget Dems and Repubs, AgentR. There are lots of conservative Dems and some liberal or at least moderate Repubs.

I'm talking left and right here.

Scandinavian countries have been run by leftists for decades and enjoy a much higher, and more sustainable, standard of living than we do.

A great example of the ultimate hard-right country is Nazi Germany. And look how long it lasted and what a great lifestyle its people enjoyed.

And a great example of a hard-left country is the Soviet Union; not so wonderful either. Any ideology can fail if the leaders engage in counterproductive decision making.

My point about the Democrats, wasn't that they were left or right, but rather to point out that the number of representatives who are currently willing to enact legislation that would drop our oil use down to 10 mbpd, is vanishingly small.

About China. I came across something interesting in Mark's Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers. It seems China is the only country still engaged in the large-scale production of steam locomotives and has based its railroad system on their continued use. Like the one-child policy, this looks to me like an example of short term sacrifice for long term gain. (After all, there are good reasons everybody else phased out steam engines.)

There's another thing, and this is completely anecdotal. A guy I work with was deployed in Iraq. He says there were Chinese troops there and that yes, he can tell Chinese from Japanese. Maybe I haven't been paying enough attention but it surprised the hell out of me.

Just some info I thought I'd toss in. By the way, I veiw conservatives, ultra-nationalists, and your general "yea, team" types as being the most successfully domesticated humans. Not placing any value judgements on it, but if you compare the intelligence of a domestic species with it's wild counterpart...

, or greed, or corruption, or resource wars, or......

It's not the ideology, it's the people in power.

I knew you were going to say that!

The Soviet Union was founded on hard-left principles, but as you note the philosophy was essentially abandoned as the leaders shifted into totalitarianism. I don't consider the Soviet Union a good example of the result of socialist principles, therefore. Sweden and Norway and now Finland are better poster children. Also many of the European countries.

I completely agree that ideology and reality are often wildly different things.

And I don't consider Nazi Germany a good example of the results of conservative principles. In the end; both went to command economies, driven by slightly different mechanisms to largely the same effect.

To me, conservative principles are best embodied in the US economic system. Australia, Japan, and the Kiwis for instance have other pieces of the conservative, free market picture, appropriately shaped by their own domestic culture.

PS: Scandanavia with 300 million people would be a hellhole.

Then we are *REALLY* screwed, because there is only one type of person that will pursue power within a democracy.

That's right. Now if there were two year term limits for all politicians, corruption might ease up a bit.

Wow. There's no other conclusion you can draw from that: This web site is a very important source of information about Peak Oil for a lot of people in the Chinese government.

Makes sense, of course. Makes you wonder what sort of traffic sites like TOD and LATOC are getting from Beijing.

Very interesting. There are a lot of Chinese people, and I guess if only a fraction of them are peak oil aware that's a lot of people. Interesting that Swedes make up the second largest non anglophone country after China. I am Swedish American. Maybe we think alike. Very interesting to see this. Does it include the news part of Peak Oil, or is it just the forums?

it includes everything