What will it take to avert disaster?

PeterBlair

Hi there...

I've been reading the forums for a while (found them after searching for Peak Oil after seeing the trailer for Oil Crash) and feel compelled to post finally and ask what people think it will take to get the majority of the public and the controllers of the world economy to face up to the environmental and economic impact that oil running out will have? Also, what can be done to try and do something before it's too late?

I've always had a niggling worry about oil running out since covering the idea in physics as a teenager, we studied renewable energy at the same time, and I found it really hard to understand why the world was still relying upon a heavily polluting source of energy when we could create electricity using totally clean sources such as wind and tidal power. I'd never put much stock in the greenhouse effect and environmentalism, dismissing it as treehugging nonsense etc. Typically the 'head in the sand' mentality kicks in and you don't think about it much...

Then the war in Iraq Part Deux happened. For the first time I realised that oil was becoming so precious that the most powerful nation in the world was so worried about keeping up a steady flow of oil that it would go against the will of the international community, the UN and most importantly the will of it's own people to ensure the continuing supply of oil.

How much time and money is currently being spent researching renewable energy sources, and more importantly is any of this research actually being implemented?

One thing which I only rarely see mentioned in connection with PeakOil is how the world will cope without any plastics. Think about how we have come to reply on plastics in the medical world, for the storage of information and worldwide communications. Glance around your home or office and imagine it without any plastics. It is a fact that oil will run out, and it seems extremely foolish to me that we are burning the last of our oil when it would be a good idea to keep some in reserve to use to create plastics. How can we harness renewable energy sources without wires to carry electricity and what will we be using to insulate them?

It's probably a worrying sign that since discovering Peak Oil I've already decided to do my politics dissertation on peak oil and the geopolitical infrastructure that supports a worldwide dependency on fossil fuels.

It just really scares me that elected governments around the world are so shortsighted and blinded by profits that they would rather suppress alternative fuel technologies and pour money into military programs than try and support a switch to renewable fuels before it's too late. The environmental implications of climate change and melting ice caps also seem to be reaching a peak point of no return and I worry that by the time a change is affected the planet will have sustained too much damage to recover.

Thanks for reading this...

Pete

lostech · Tar Sands Joined: Oct 18, 2004 Posts: 31

I doubt we'll see an end to plastics. There is a lot of low-grade stuff still out there (like tar sands), that, while maybe not too viable as energy sources, would still make sense to mine for plastic production. That said, plastics will be much more expensive in the future.

truecougarblue · Heavy Crude Joined: Dec 21, 2005 Posts: 480

What will it take?

A majority (at least) of the people in any given nation will need to act, or be forced to act, unselfishly.

Unless the bill of rights loses the remainder of it's validity in the US, we'll need to depend on the poulation as a whole to "get it".

Good luck.
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Dreamtwister · Fission Joined: Feb 06, 2006 Posts: 2285

Ludi

truecougarblue · Heavy Crude Joined: Dec 21, 2005 Posts: 480

So Ludi is a selfish person, "dedicated to helping educate people about how to help themselves, their families, and their neighbors..."

Somewhat oxymoronic is it not?

My definition of selfish is the motivation to immediately fulfill all wants and desires as they occur. That is how most people live their lives.

A person who is seeking the good of others for the greater good is in my mind selfless, not selfish.

thuja

I hate to be the niggling doomer in teh conversation- but my friends, lets admit to ourselves that it is too late- too late to imagine that world governments will band together...to do what? The reality is that there is no alternative to "saving" the way we function as a society. Liquid fuels cannot be replaced by alternatives such as Biofuels (too little) or nuclear (too late).

So we're left with facing reality; that liquid fuel (and most energy) will become increasingly expensive year after year until there is a breakpoint...nations start to horde what's left and those without reserves will be forced into powerdown.

Can we prepare? Sure, but not to try and save the world as we know it and hope for a mythical fix. We can prepare by facing a harsh relaity ahead and try to mitigate the worst of its effect through education, intense conservation, slow sustained depopulation and relocalizing; shifting gears to locally sustainable food, goods and services.

My 2 cents.

Ludi

That's generous of you, cougarblue. Smile

But behavior such as mine was characterised as "selfish" in another thread, and I'm simply agreeing. It is in my own best interest that those around me be as comfortable as possible so they don't take my stuff and make me miserable too. See? That's selfish. I'm not an altruistic person.

I also want to counter the notion that "we all have to advance to the next spiritual plane" or some such crap in order to avoid disaster.
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untothislast

Hi Peter, and welcome to gloom central.

When I first started contributing to - and learning from - these forums, I was optimistic that PO would (in the long term) obliquely help to make the world a better place.

Sadly, it appears that climate change is going to seal all our fates - being that we've reached the point now where we can no longer intervene to ameliorate its effects. The responsible scientific consensus, is that even if all the most optimistic projections for CO2 emission reductions were enacted, we would still be facing a 3º rise in mean global temperature - which will be ruinous for agricultural production alone - not to mention the deleterious effect on marine organisms helping to produce the oxygen we breathe.

PO rightly hogs all the attention here - but climate change is going to be the real nightmare killer. What will it take to avert disaster? How about a new, pristine Planet Earth nearby - with ready access.

grabby · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Nov 08, 2005 Posts: 1328

Not much we can really do.
BUT, if you could live TODAY without using any oil you could then live tomorrow without oil.
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NordicHero

The way to avert disaster and make the world a wonderful place is to dispose of 6.8 billion morons.

Let the top 100 million inherit the Earth and steward her wisely.

pstarr

Doly · Expert Joined: Dec 03, 2004 Posts: 4041

gg3

Hey NordicHero, what's your definition of civilization?

Peter, the news is not good. Look at any graph of human population over the past 5,000 years and pay close attention to the implications of what's going on at the far right of the graph, the last hundred years when we have had cheap energy.

The communists have a grain of truth when they refer to humans as "the masses." Moving mass has inertia, and as above, so below. Now think of the inertia of the mass of 6.5 billion humans, and all of their social and economic systems that are based on cheap energy. Think of turning all that mass around against its own inertial vector. It is somewhat like turning an ocean liner to avoid an iceberg that has just come out of the fog at the last minute.

The best we can hope for is mitigation: minimizing the damage. But damage there will be, and it will not be small.

This does not mean we shoudn't try. Reduce population, reduce consumption, build non-fossil energy (nuclear, wind, solar) like our lives depend on it (they do), vote like your life depends on it (it does), re-localize, re-tool, and re-train.

For those of us who are PO-aware, we have to choose the location where we will live and work, with all due consideration for the likely future; and then, having done so, we have to put our money and our muscles where our mouths are and do whatever we can to have the biggest impact on the widest scale. For some of us that means concentrating on local resilience. For others it means working at national or international levels, politically or economically or both. Put the bulk of your efforts where you as an individual can have the greatest effect, and then play a supporting role to those working at other levels where they can have their own greatest effects.

You'll see many ideas in these pages, some good, some bad, and you'll have some time to think before you make your choices. Use the time wisely, it grows shorter by the day. If you find yourself going through despair or anxiety, just note the emotion as an empirical fact like any other, and then get back to doing what you can and must.

And above all else, remember this: Every single one of your ancestors was able to survive the challenges of their own times, going back all the way to day one. That is a 100% track record. In the inevitable moments of feeling down about the future, you can remind yourself that the challenges we face are hardly as severe as those faced by our ancestors. They made it. We can as well. Now roll up your sleeves, there is much work to be done.

PeterBlair

Many thanks to everyone for the warm welcome.

I agree that there is a huge inertia to consider - particularly in China and India where industrialisation is the main goal over the next 10-15 years, not reducing CO2 and increasing reliance on renewable energy sources. Basically the world cannot sustain everyone in even one of the two of those countries living with a similar ecological footprint to those in the west.

To continue the physics analogy, a body at rest is likely to remain at rest - which means all the individuals in the world who are used to living a comfortable consumerist lifestyle will not only find it hard to start relying on local produce and working closer to home but will also be unwilling to try.

I agree that we are dire straits but I'm extremely concerned that the general consensus on the forums seems to be that the only way the world will return to a natural balance will be with the extinction of a large proportion of the population. Some of the posts I've seen (not in this thread) seem to already be swinging towards survivalism, which seems extreme even this late in the game.

Is this shift of most major political groups towards ecological concern a case of too little too late? Surely if a huge international effort was undertaken over the next 10-15 years the blow would be lessened to a great degree. For example, Sweden moving towards a society non-reliant on fossil fuels.