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Page added on November 15, 2016
Peak Oil & System Justification: Denial Will Be Costly
Scientists say there’s a tension in the brain between responding to new information and resisting overwhelming amounts of conflicting data—and the latter can prevent opinion change.
Altering opinion depends on using different psychological methods tailored to different types of belief.… ‘There’s not much convincing people,’ even when the beliefs in question are purely false, says psychiatrist Philip Corlett of Yale University School of Medicine.
DISCOMFORTING REALITIES
For oil industry officials and/or their media acolytes to pretend that all is well with our prospects for maintaining not just an adequate, but more importantly, an affordable and readily-accessible supply of the same quality fossil fuel supply (oil, specifically) is an understandable strategy—if making profits no matter what is the sole objective. As a statement of respect for the public and social responsibility, it is wildly irresponsible.
Fossil fuel—oil in particular—plays an essential role in almost everything that touches our everyday lives. From the food we eat; to the means by which we transport ourselves; to the creation and availability of the innumerable products we need and use; to the availability of and development of the just-as-countless services we rely upon; to everything else we grow, build, have, own, need, and do, oil is almost always an important element.
Just look outside your window and appreciate all that our ingenuity and technological prowess has created. But consider also the output and process of both creation and use. Multiply that by countless millions of locales and hundreds of millions of other individuals and organizations doing the same, dependent on that same finite and ever-depleting resource. No consequences to any of this? Seriously?
The facts are being taken hostage in an ever more intense war over deep values, particularly about environmental issues.
Among other facts I raised in an earlier post in this series suggesting that the pro-fossil fuel camp is working double-time to try and convince an unknowing public that all is well in the oil supply world was this observation:
But all is not well with the oil sector. Between 2000 and 2012, $2.6 Trillion USD was invested in oil infrastructure CAPEX, with no gain in oil production (this data includes shale oil production in USA).¹ Global crude and condensate production has plateaued since approximately 2005. The problem with this is world population is 13.8% larger now than in 2005 (7.4 billion people 5/2/2016 vs 6.5 billion in 2005). Increasingly unconventional sources of oil are being used to meet demand, where these sources are expensive to extract and struggle to meet the desired quantities.
UNDERSTANDABLE, BUT NOT HELPFUL
We take comfort, if that’s the right word, in our realization that climate change and reaching the peak in oil production are not problems which will land fully formed on our doorsteps next Tuesday; so we think we can set it aside until some undetermined date in the future after we’ve dealt with all of today’s problems. Perfectly understandable. Perfectly inappropriate.
As the evidence presented in that prior post made clear, real-world factors about the challenges and conditions of ongoing fossil fuel production give lie to the feel-good pronouncements that all is well. All is not well.
So while protecting and reinforcing the free-market-heals-all status quo is a fundamental aim of traditional conservatism in the corporate and media world, the facts they and we must accept is that we are now on the downside of conventional crude oil supply, and what’s generated as a substitute has inherent drawbacks. Higher costs, technological challenges, and inferior quality are but a few of the key factors now playing a greater role in determining the availability and affordability of our future energy supplies.
Idiotic assertions that peak oil advocates are insisting that we are running out of oil is a convenient tactic to soothe anxious supporters, but that lie has a limited usefulness. Instead of enlightening the public that we will be facing significant challenges in the years to come and that planning/preparation now, while resources are plentiful and available/affordable enough to do so effectively, they continue to be fed a stream of disingenuous nonsense.
When vested interests with outsize economic and cultural power distort the public debate by introducing falsehoods, the integrity of our deliberations is compromised.
Statements about the total resources underground are impressive, and certainly designed to put to bed any worries about future supply. They are meaningless, but no one in the industry or their Happy Talk media cheerleaders bother pointing out that saying it and then producing all of those magnificent, impressive totals are vastly different subjects. But it certainly plays well to a crowd eager for any tidbit to ease fears, keep things simple, and reassure them that all is well.
People reject scientific evidence when it does not fit their worldviews and values, challenging governments to make evidence-based policies that do the most good for the most people over the long term, but also respond to short term pressure from small but loud and politically effective advocacy groups….
And that puts us all at risk, because as the issues grow ever more complex, we increasingly need our leaders to make well-informed decisions that not only respect our values, but also do thoughtful justice to the facts.
Reinforcement of their own beliefs—either on their own by repeating the same “facts” they’ve been relying upon, or securing needed reassurances from authoritative sources—are making it that much more difficult to find common ground. While “successful” in providing support for what they need to maintain the conservative status quo, over the long haul it simply makes things more difficult for everyone.
Ignoring the factual truth about anthropogenic climate change means we are dramatically limiting the opportunities and choices of future generations.
That’s not our best choice….
12 Comments on "Peak Oil & System Justification: Denial Will Be Costly"
Davy on Wed, 16th Nov 2016 5:51 am
I am wondering what is the point in this article in regards to common ground? This article is part of the same deception just a little bit further away from the truly false narrative it complains about. Common ground should be we have a world with 5BIL or so too many people going into a period of economic decline, resource depletion, systematic network dysfunction, and environmental failure. Common ground for that list of problems is a die off. A population in overshoot cannot overcome those dangers in combination and in reinforcement. This is a clear example of a tipping point.
An example of common ground would be a world who has definitive proof that an earth killing asteroid is 10 years away. The fact that my list above is a “killer predicament” is different. Why is it different? It is different because it is not a narrowed down threat. An asteroid that is 10 years away and definitely within 95% accuracy going to strike the earth and kill a significant amount of the global population would be common ground because we can relate to one threat with a known time frame quite well. What we cannot get our hands around is multi-dimensional problems that have unknown time frames. Both are likely kill events in 10 years’ time one is fully known the other vague and prone to distortions. One apocalypse will be an event that once it impacts it will in a short time kill its people and the other is the slow boil of death and destruction over multiple years at variable rates.
There are no solutions to an existential condition like my list above. We are done as a modern civilization just the details are in a fog. Those who trumpet the dangers of climate change and offer solutions are in denial. There are no solutions to this problem. It may be the case that doing nothing is not going to make a measurable difference because modern man is set to crash for other reasons. It is the combination of many problems that will end modern man at some point.
If we choose to decarbonize the world and make a real difference then we will need to decarbonize so much that the results are a die off. Carbon is directly related to population levels. Take carbon away and you drop the population. The other issue is maintaining confidence to keep what we have going. This is no different than keeping an army in positions or a disorderly retreat. If you crash global confidence by mass decarbonization then you cause an economic depression that will kill people. People are going to starve and be exposed to the elements and this will kill. This is the great green denial of climate change activist. Don’t think you can have your cake and eat it. Greens are good at this. They claim if we decarbonize then we can have affluence but just a different kind of affluence.
What are the solutions? There really are no solutions at many levels. Global modern man is self-organizing and self-adaptive. It is called survival and life choices by the billions. At an individual level you can be in a wide spectrum of existential psychological adaption. You can choose a range of denial and acceptance. Within that range you can choose to make arrangements or not. Some can adapt and mitigate either now or by prepping. Others may choose to live well now and take the pain latter. Some are not even capable of knowing the difference. The problem with modern man is the majority is unable to relate to these complex issues for multiple reasons. They never will so it is useless to think we can change so many inadequate minds. These issues are too complex for the average human so they shut down. This is not all their fault and they should not be blamed completely for this. Human psychology is all over the place and this is the reason at the macro level life will unfold under its own devices.
It will likely take an actual crisis that is disruptive to the global population to initiate changes that could be adaptive and mitigate only some of the dangerous life threatening scenarios. The problem is by that time it is too late for an optimum effort. There is always the other issue of destroying confidence if people chose to prepare for a life threatening situation pre-crisis. This pre-crisis effort would disrupts a global world in overshoot because of the economies of scale of consumption and overpopulation. This is a catch 22 situation.
It really doesn’t matter except at your individual and small community level. By embracing meaning as an individual you will find sanctuary in the truth. There is no physical sanctuary. What is worse is meaning and the truth is a fog. Man is no better than the beasts physically but with a brain that can anticipate death and that is the real tragedy of being human. Yet, meaning is a spiritual sanctuary. No amount of hardship or death can take the spiritual sanctuary of meaning from you. So in the end there is nothing you can do existentially. We are all at risk even the prepped and materially prepared ones. It is the spiritual realm that matters. It is likely the spiritual realm of man where the real evolution will occur once we go into our collective bottleneck of a die off that is right around the corner.
Davy on Wed, 16th Nov 2016 8:01 am
“From Pole to Pole, Global Sea Ice Values are Plummeting”
https://robertscribbler.com/
“During the record hot year of 2016, both Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extents took a huge hit….global sea ice extent during the hottest year on record has steadily plummeted to near 4 million square kilometers below average as the months progressed… In total, global sea ice coverage is now about 3,865,000 square kilometers below average. If you think that number sounds really big, it’s because it is. It represents a region of lost ice nearly 40 percent the size of the land and water area of the entire United States including Alaska and Hawaii. To visualize it another way, imagine all of the land area of Alaska, California, Texas, Montana, Arizona and New Mexico combined and you begin to get the gist.”
divadab on Wed, 16th Nov 2016 9:51 am
Dang, Davy, cheer up, will you? You assume that without fossil fuels, human agriculture cannot feed all the people. I call BS. Human and animal and sustainable electric-fueled agriculture can and will feed as many people as fossil-fueled chemical ag does now. It just requires about 50-70% of the population to be involved in ag (as in India to this day) and for most people to be vegetarian (also as in India). But food will be local and only the rarest luxuries will travel globally. Since we will be back to the days of sail and solar-electric shipping. And I’m pretty sure we can still have the internet in a post-fossil fueled future.
You doom-and-gloomers really need to pull your thumbs out and do something useful. You’re flipping depressing.
Davy on Wed, 16th Nov 2016 10:23 am
Excuse me Diva, is there a peer reviewed honest and useful study saying we can feed 7BIL without industrial AG somewhere I can read. Everything I have read is rubish including your comment.
Let’s consider the lack of logistics, education, and will. Let’s consider a destroyed climate. We have too many people in the wrong places doing the wrong things to switch over like your idea of a transition. We need also review your definition of sustainable electricity. Those word definitions don’t work together. Using a country in severe overshoot on every metric like India shows how little you understand about the subject.
Diva, my thumb is out of my ass. I am doing permaculture grass fed cattle and goats. I have the garden, orchard, vineyard, natural forage. I have solar power and am buying hand tools when I can. I am downsizing with dignity and practicing relative sacrifice.
Where is your thumb? When you hold it up to your nose does it stink like shit? If so it was probably in your ass. My feet stink like goat and cattle shit but that is obviously different.
paulo1 on Wed, 16th Nov 2016 10:28 am
Hi Davy,
One thing about change, so many people simply cannot accept that the status quo, that what they have grown up with, can be affected. Think of the Trump win, the slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’. What that really means is make it the way we thought it was. There might be a Mayberry with Grandpas living just down the street, a mom at home instead of working at the grocery store checkout on Sunday, a job available to all kids after high school (if they don’t ‘take a year out and go travelling’. This is what was promised and what was voted for, at the very least, implied. That, and the concept of restricting the admittance of ‘those who do not look like us’, worship like we do, or think like Americans. Plus, brown people should be legal and stay happily behind the lawnmower. Blacks? Everyody just wants to forget about that nightmare from historical slavery past sins.
My sister, who is firmly in the US educated middle class, has now sunk into a severe depression. For her, the past election cycle blew her sanity….and it was just politics. If you add on to that climate catastrophe, food insecurity, limited use of cars, no air travel, and impossible to meet expectations, then everything in her life has been rendered meaningless. It is just too much to handle. For my sister, and many many like her in the established well-off and comfortable class, everything she knows and has believed in just got pissed on.
People will have to re-discover their faith (of whatever stripe), and find comfort in shared beliefs and community. The secular world is disolving in our hands. A full woodshed and larder will only take you so far. If you don’t even have that, well what is there?
I don’t see it getting better until people change.
From Mississippi Burning:
Ward: Where does it come from, all this hatred?
Anderson: You know, when I was a little boy, there was an old Negro farmer lived down the road from us, name of Monroe. And he was, uh, – well, I guess he was just a little luckier than my Daddy was. He bought himself a mule. That was a big deal around that town. Now, my Daddy hated that mule, ’cause his friends were always kiddin’ him about oh, they saw Monroe out plowin’ with his new mule, and Monroe was gonna rent another field now they had a mule. And one morning that mule just showed up dead. They poisoned the water. And after that there was never any mention about that mule around my Daddy. It just never came up. So one time, we were drivin’ down the road and we passed Monroe’s place and we saw it was empty. He’d just packed up and left, I guess. Gone up North, or somethin’. I looked over at my Daddy’s face – and I knew he’d done it. And he saw that I knew. He was ashamed. I guess he was ashamed. He looked at me and he said: ‘If you ain’t better than a nigger, son, who are you better than?’…He was an old man just so full of hate that he didn’t know that bein’ poor was what was killin’ him.
Watch for a resurgence of religion, cults, counselling options, and coping programs. And why not?
Apneaman on Wed, 16th Nov 2016 11:04 am
diva, depressing huh? That’s the reality of not being a child with a fantasy understanding of how humans operate. In the real post oil world I will fucking kill half of your tribe and enslave the rest so I don’t have to labour in the fields and so I can eat steak every night while you and the rest of the field slaves eat porridge. Do you think it’s a coincidence that the first large scale social rumblings against chattel slavery happened not long after industrialisation got under way? You’ll be finding out the hard hard way that much of your warm N fuzzy image of humans is a spoiled westerners luxury of soft and safe living.
penury on Wed, 16th Nov 2016 11:52 am
As the saying is said “you can deny reality, but you cannot prevent reality.” Take it from someone who grew up in a non-electrical, non running water, non-plumbing and no doctors, dentists, or supermarkets, world you have no idea of the changes coming your way. Cheer up, it can get worse. So I cheered up, and it did.
Davy on Wed, 16th Nov 2016 12:28 pm
Sound wisdom Paulo. It is good to hear from you. I thought about you the other day because it looks like you are getting huge amounts of rain up there in BC. Stay dry my friend.
makati1 on Wed, 16th Nov 2016 6:13 pm
For those who have two hours (1:47:12) to spare this weekend, I recommend this video. I watched it for the 3rd time yesterday and got even more than I did the other two times. And it is free. You can just listen to it while you do something else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8oLMS11Ht4
“America’s Economic Doom : Documentary on the National Debt and Crumbing Economic System”
It is from 2009, but is even more appropriate today. Time is running out.
makati1 on Wed, 16th Nov 2016 6:32 pm
After you watch that video, read this article … and it will all become crystal clear.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-16/war-cash-intensifies-citibank-stop-accepting-cash-some-branches
You will know why this article is wrong about gold and silver but correct about banks and cash.
Apneaman on Thu, 17th Nov 2016 5:55 pm
This one goes in two files. 1) How the small business owner gets fucked by AGW. 2) Things deniers must completly ignore to maintain their illusion and protect their tribal identity. FFS’s there is shin deep water in the streets when it rains and at high tide when there never used to be water in the streets when it rains and at high tides. It’s been going on long enough the they raised the road, spent millions on huge industrial pumps and million on new beach sand. Ya, tell yourselves it’s all part of the elaborate hoax.
Flood claim denied for restaurant turned ‘basement’ after Miami Beach raised street
“Miami Beach has spent tens of millions raising streets in the low-lying Sunset Harbour neighborhood to prevent rising tides from flooding the area.
That left some establishments a few feet down at a lower sidewalk level. Unknown to their owners, their businesses are also at a level not usually seen in South Florida: the basement.
That’s what an insurance adjuster decided was the new status of a restaurant at the low corner of 18th Street and Purdy Avenue. Because basements are below ground level, Allstate is saying federal flood coverage doesn’t apply to a restaurant that claims it had $15,000 worth of damage after recent torrential rains.”
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article115264938.html
Apneaman on Thu, 17th Nov 2016 6:01 pm
The Supermoon and Global Warming: A Taste of Things to Come
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/11/17/this_week_s_supermoon_did_have_one_effect_flooding.html