Micro,

I'm kinda with Bob Cousins on this one, albeit in a less cruel manner.

I think it is simply one of those things that you do in the course of living and never consider. Being honest, it is quickly apparent that it is quite impossible to consider and thoroughly research everything you find yourself in touch with on a daily basis. Think about it. You wake up from sleeping, hop into the shower (where did this water come from? will it last? what about the energy heating the water?), get dressed (how many Tibetans died making my T shirt?), pour your coffee (free-trade? pesticide free?), put on your aftershave (any mice killed in the testing of this product?), grab your briefcase (enviro-polluting plastic or cruel killing leather?), hop into your car (will the oil peak next month? can I afford the gas?), get on the freeway (how will these roads be maintained if the deficit gets too high?) ...and on and on...

One person cannot be informed or an expert about everything. Therefore, you must depend to some extent on others to "take care of things". Every time I drive over a bridge I hope that there's enough money to inspect that bridge, that the bridge inspector knows what he or she is doing, and that the recommendations are followed. If they're not, I might be floating down the river. If I am, so be it. You can't exist in civilization without faith of some sort, in some things. I think this is largely true with peak oil. Most people never stopped to consider in their day-to-day living, and those that did had faith that the problem would be resolved.

Of course, there are those that are just ignorant and blissful - give 'em NASCAR and Budweiser and life is good.

PS: Being from the South, I noticed your post about being in a gifted program in public school. Without offending too many people, a gifted program in the South is akin to a normal program in the West and Northeast. I have the experience of kids who attended public schools in the Northeast and the South as personal proof.

Agree. If I had not been in a HS honors program, there is no way I would have been admitted to Caltech. The regular program was seriously substandard. But at least there was a well funded honors program rather than teaching all students at the level of the slowest learners - which is what seems to be happening now. On the other hand, maybe US education has been pointless since the end of the cold war as all skilled jobs are being outsourced anyway.

I'm 26 now. Growing up as a child I've always been an outcast, picked on and bullied by everyone, so it's no wonder that by the time I reached my teens I was (and frankly, still am) quite messed up. And I had long loong bouts of depression. Not suicidal, but more a gloomy "I'm never ever gonna be happy and probably won't live to be 50'. And to be honest, I've never actually been truly happy so far. In that light, peak oil or anything related to energy simply didn't cross my mind. I had other things to worry (mope) about.
I've read newspapers since I was like, 6 years old. I probably didn't understand much of it, or wasn't able to connect the dots. Although I've always had the feeling that there was something going on behind the curtains that couldn't stand daylight. As a kid, 12 or something, this translated into UFO conspiracy interest, X-files like stuff. On the other hand I've never been a dumb kid and I've always believed that 'end-of-the-world' scenarios never happen, they're just things people use to control other people. Mainly, church & state control the masses. And I reasoned, the end of the world has been predicted so many times yet here we are, all alive and still kicking.
I haven't really been critical of the USA's actions until Bush entered office. I don't think I followed elections much before then. And I really didn't know the extend to which they'd go in smear campaigns, corruption and lies for power. The invasion of Afghanistan seemed an appropriate answer to 9/11 cause that's where Bin laden was supposed to be, and the media had already shown the Taliban as these opressive backwards religious nutjobs. But with the Iraq war it was clear as day there was something else going on. With Abu Graihb, torture outsourced to other countries, the patriot act, Cheney's comments concerning torture and other things from the Bush administration, my eyes have been opened for good.

i just learned of peak oil about a year ago and yes i didnt think about the grocery store or where electricity came from or for that matter where gas came from but in the past year my eyes have been opened wide and im playing catch up to get prepared for what is going to happen to us all i dont think of myself as stupid merely uninformed my cellar is full of canned fruits and veggies i have plenty of rice and cured meats and my guns are all loaded and cleaned

3 years ago i started to think of the world's depending on oil.
I realize then that it must have an end, and so i started to find out some more information.
This year i have the acces to internet and so i found more information about PO. and in a short periode of time i realized that it could have some drastic conseqeunses.
i started thinking where to go and live during and after PO and maybe take lessons in survival skills. all kinds of wild idea's came up and i really have no idea of what will come.
I'm very afraid of the slow proces of going down in all sorts of materials and resources and that the wealth and healt of people will no longer be sustained. i also think of the poor countries, at this moment there is still a little(far from enough, but that is an another story) economic input by charity and smallscale trading, but when PO is there, they will be the hardest-hit victims, i'm afraid.

ok, the moment is still there and on this moment we, my husband and my son(2) are thinking of where to go. exually we want to have a piece of agricultural land an the possibility to keep livestock and be selfsufficient. the question is were??? not too close to a city, otherwise when cities are the worst place to live in people will come to the farms for food and shelter and so on.

I'm afraid live will be a hazard and lot and lots of people will not survive. That is what i think of and it keeps me busy everyday. And when i look in my son's eyes i just only can think of 1 thing: you will have a difficult future and that was a understatement!!!

Hi everybody!

I've been interested in this topic for a while, only started reading this forum a few weeks ago. This is one of the most interesting threads I've read so far, enough so that I registered to post a reply.

I am 29, about to turn 30. Grew up in suburban Ohio in a town that would be considered exurban in the 1970's. My earliest awareness of PO was reading National Geographic's special issue on energy (it stood out on the shelf, bright orange among a shelf of yellow). I was too young to remember the Carter administration. My parents always drove Buicks with large engines and oil/gas was never really discussed.

Only from reading history at school and mostly on my own did I begin to understand oil and energy's importance. As a WWII buff from an early age I read about energy's role in military campaigns i.e. the German drive to secure Russia's Caspian Sea oil deposits, as well as domestic measures like rationing in both Axis and Allied nations.

In 1995 I took a college course on urban studies and also read James Howard Kunstler's "Geography of Nowhere" on my own outside of school. This book was relavatory, it encapsulated my teenage loathing of suburbia. I didn't think much about oil but was more interested in alternatives to suburbia, yet semi-oblivious to its unsustainability.

1997-1998 I was making more money than I'd ever made in my life delivering pizza in suburbia, filling up my 1989 Accord with gas at $.97 per gallon.

Went back to college full time in 1998, totalled my Accord in an accident, and lived car free for three years in Columbus. Walking, bicycling, and riding the bus, it was easy to get around with few exceptions like grocery shopping.

I bought a used Camry in 2001 as graduation was approaching and I would need a car to find a job. I remember on 9/11 I registered the car and got my plates that morning and was driving home when people in New York started calling in on Howard Stern screaming that the World Trade Center was on fire. I got home in time to see the second plane hit the building.

Since graduating college in December 2001 I've been living under the shadow of Bush's recession (there has been NO recovery in Ohio) and the neocon war which I sincerely believe Rumsfeld's comment, will be a "generational committment".

I've watched the price of gasoline slowly climb and stay above $2.00 as inflation erodes my already modest standard of living. My current job in financing auto and truck loans is subject to the volatility of oil prices and interest rates. It is a dead end with no future and I am getting out of it soon and going to grad school.

Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma and reading Kunstler's "Long Emergency" last year have cemented my belief that the American model of consumption and suburbia is completely unsustainable and will decline/collapse within my lifetime.

On a personal note I have no wife or children, little debt and few assets, and a desire to dump what non-utilitarian things I still own. I feel like a freak in our society, surrounded by oblivious consumers, able to discuss PO and America's decline with only family and a few enlightened friends. Driving as little as possible and trying to avoid buying and owning things is how I live now.

Discovering the peakoil.com forum was another welcome reminder of why I no longer view or listen to commercial media.

Simply wasn't interested at the time. Until I see a sustained drop of 10 mbpd, to be honest, I won't be convinced that the peak did happened. The problem is yall are relying on a prediction about discoveries. Now, maybe the trend does continue and there are no more big fields discovered, and if so, peak is somewhere around now, ie, 2005-2015, or therebouts. If yall are wrong, and 2015 produces about the same or more oil than we do in 2006, then you will have done yet more damage to the public's willingness to acknowledge impending disasters.

To a certain exent, I wasn't particularly interested since it just appeared to be yet another "issue" various left wing groups were attempting to use to move policy preferences. Since discussing this here and reading a few books (library only, not bought), I've come to the conclusion that these lefties have hitched themselves to a very unmanageable beast of burden.

If peak oil is truly coming into play now; then when its effects manifest, Americans are not going to be offended by the idea of fighting for oil; they are going to DEMAND it. When oil is $200 bbl, ANWR will be drilled with the quickest, dirtiest, most productive methodologies deployable; and you won't be able to find a dozen politiicians in the whole country that will oppose burning even the nastiest coal in order to turn food into gasoline.

They won't be looking for blame; they'll be looking for salvation.
Shell and ExxonMobile will raise their hands and say, "let us do ABC, and we'll save you." And the people will stand, and in one voice, shout: "make it happen!"

(MicroHydro, you mentioned in your first posting that Huxley had it pegged in 1928. Which book or essay, and do you have the quote?)

I was aware of "environmental issues" at about age 9, and quickly figured out that every single such issue was ultimately driven by overpopulation. I read _Limits to Growth_ in highschool and concluded that the first half of the 21st century would be the crunch time. Also concluded that the necessary response strategy was two-fold: a) build sustainable communities as test platforms for new technologies and methods, and as personal/group "insurance" against the probable crises, and b) use all of the tools of private enterprise and civic engagement to minimize the depth, intensity, and duration of the crisis phase.

However, when I was in college people thought this was "survivalism" and "not politically correct." Fast-forward 20-something years of not getting anywhere on this, and we come to the present.

I first learned about PO in a specific way (i.e. as distinct from other resources crises) a couple of years ago and at the same time found this board and signed on. Prior to that point I believed that other sustainability crises would go critical before fossil fuel shortage went critical. At this point I see all of them running neck-and-neck (ha, the proverbial horsemen of apocalypse at the race track!:-).

Either way my original conclusion has held: build sustainable communities, and use every tool of free enterprise and politics to minimize the severity of the crisis. The difference now is that I've found others who have arrived at the same or similar conclusion on their own, and we agree on the overall framework, and we are working concertedly toward our goals in these areas.

At this point I don't believe we'll be able to turn things around at a macro level to the degree needed to prevent a catastrophic scenario during this century. When Carter was President I felt there was a decent chance, but since that point, the odds have declined to the point where now the primary emphasis is on sustainable community for the sake of personal/group resilience. That is to say, it appears the perfect storm is coming whether we like it or not, so it's now time to batten down the hatches and ride it out. This does not mean abandoning engagement in economic and civic affairs, only a shift in priorities until such time as our group is safely established in the country.

i'm 48. when i started as a design engineer in Silicon Valley, it was "before outsourcing". actually, we were still doing engineering drawings on paper.

my first job, the "outsourcing" was to San Antonio, Texas. we made drawings and occasionally got a free trip to the plant in San Antonio, if we wanted it. at that time, the outsourcing made sense - i accepted that "loaded" (with overhead) labor rates were lower in San Antonio.

in 1985 i did some consulting for some of the guys i worked with in the first job. they were outsourcing everything above 100 MHz to Taiwan, another guy who worked at the first job had returned to his home in Taiwan and set up a microwave manufacturing facility.

also about that time, i got a tour of a company named Convergent Technology, right in Silicon Valley. they had built a huge automated manufacturing facility. i spent a few hours speaking with the employees and then indicated where the robots and other machines i was selling could be integrated into the facility. i showed that to the customer, a manufacturing engineer. he freaked out, like i had stolen their manufacturing process, and introduced me to one of the plant managers, which was actually good.

anyway - and this relates to "going local" - in the early to mid 1980's, a lot of manufacturing in Silicon Valley was local.

for about the next 15 years, i worked for 2 companies that were vertically integrated ... the rest outsourced. the engineers at the vertically integrated (local manufacturing companies) spent a lot less time doing paperwork.

anyway, outsourcing always struck me as Bullsh*t. but, it was my job to support it, so i did.

so i didn't think about Peak Oil until Michael Ruppert, Matt Simmons, Ken Deffeyes et al started ringing the alarm bell, after 9-11.

as far as, "what was i thinking" ? about doing my job, getting laid, and going to the gym after work.

now when i hear people talk about "going local" i think about as being like "the old days", though with iPods.

i would love to see manufacturing re-patriated (localized), including food production. there was a lot of food production in Silicon Valley in the "old days". considering what companies spend on air conditioning and the cost of electricity, it makes sense to build plants (engineering & manufacturing) underground, and to grow food on the roof or at ground level.

one of the other drivers for outsourcing was - no pollution control. this happened recently (in 2005) with the shutdown of Clark Foam, the biggest maker of surfboard blanks in the world. their plant in Irvine County got shut down, permanently. Cyanide is an integral part of polyurethane foam, "TDI" is the acronym for another nasty chemical used in surfboard manufacturing.

anyway, i was always more comfortable as an engineer with local, non polluting manufacturing processes.

I dislike the original question because it implies that if didn't know about peak oil, you were somehow doing something wrong. Obviously peak oil as a concept has been around for decades, but it is only in the last decade has it really passed form being a fringe or very industry specific idea to one of wider acceptance and or relevance. The real reason that we are seeing wider acceptance, is because peak oil is becoming relevent. 20 years is relatively long time horizon for most people and so until the time horizon for event is less than 5 years things do start to happen. Look at Y2K. Not much was done, until the last couple of years of the 1990's. The main difference, is that Y2K has a specific date to work on. Peak oil has no such date. However, it is clear that peak oit is likely within the 5 year time horizon and so the effects of peak oil are starting to occur. Peak oil is no longer something that is going to happen in the far future, but most likely relatively soon. This is why most people have started to learn about peak oil.

beer is foamy

This Golf GTI burns alot of oil.... (I do mean oil! It was ok on the petrol consumption).

I caught the tail-end of the 70's energy crisis. But then it was lull-a-bye time as the U.S. went back to sleep, IMHO. But I think alot of us retained the behavior pattern if you experienced the lines at the gas station. I chase my kids around turning off lights, minimizing the A/C use, avoiding wasting gas on unnecessary car trips. They think it's nonsense of course - partly because they're kids, partly because they have only known gas stations always have gas, electric company always gives electricty.

So I guess it's like the old-timers living through the Depression. My wife has a grandmother from that era and she will not leave a restaurant without finishing the glass of water. They retained certain behaviors but meanwhile she lived in a house with oil heat and A/C.

So a similar question could be framed what were we thinking between 1929 and 2006 if we go into another Depression due to PO. The answer would be the same I guess. We went about raising kids, getting ready for retirement, etc. Kind of like that quote in the Bible ...
For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. (NIV Bible, Matthew 24:37)

I am older than 26. I grew up in the oil and natural gas hub of Alberta and drove happily everywhere for decades. The first inkling for me that something was wrong was just the feeling that I had about all the cars in the city where I live. Over the years, the city streets have become steadily more congested, which is a source of irritation for me and I always did think about the environmental damage the exhaust was causing. Also, as a person who has always loved running/walking with my kids and dogs, I looked for places to do these things without breathing the car-polluted air. And just the sheer number of vehicles on the road seemed to me like so many ants in an anthill.

After high school and working in various jobs, I attended a technical college and have been working in a paramedical field since (except for a year when I studied education at university). After 911 happened, I guess I was satisfied for a while that the US government was doing the right things for the right reasons, but after some time I thought it didn't make sense that all of those specialized troops could not find Bin Laden. About that time, I started to hear others being vocal about the reason for invasion being oil, and I started to think there may be something to that. Therefore, in the summer of 2005 when I came across a technocracy pamphlet by accident and read it, I stumbled across information that sent me investigating a number of web sites and learning about peak oil.

When I was younger I never questioned the availability of oil, especially, I think, because Alberta's economy is all about oil and I could see the evidence of that everywhere. I know I learned in school that it is a finite resource, but I guess I just figured there was enough left in the ground to last a very long time.

Fast forward to the last few years, and I noticed the content of my children's homework assignments having more emphasis on resources and the finite nature of them. Last September, they brought home current events assignments that stated the supply of oil would last only 30 more years. This really got my attention because the assertion was that we would only have oil for 30 more years, not that peak would be here in 30 years. Of course, this was just a couple months after my introduction to peak oil via the technocracy pamphlet.

Overall, I suppose I just took a lot for granted when I was younger. My life has been very full and has kept me busy. I'm spending more of my "free" time now reading and learning, digging and noticing. Sometimes the future looks awful to me but I still prefer to focus on the things I can do, especially for our young people's sake.

Hi guys. First post. I've been lurking for a while and I thought this would be a good place to jump in.

I was 21 in 2000, working towards a degree in computing. I first became aware of peak oil recently, when doing research into why fuel prices are so high and why they spiked recently here in the UK. It's just shy of £1 a litre here.

There were a few websites that kept coming up whenever I googled about the subject: LATOC, wolfatthedoor.org.uk, and peakoil.com

Now, I'm hitting those websites nearly every day, searching for as much info as I can take in, trying to determine a timeline for peak, and trying to decide if I should jack in my career in computing - the most useless post-peak career I can imagine.

Thanks to frugal living during my time as a student, I was able to pay off what little debt I had managed to build up in a very short time. Following the posts on these boards, I feel incredibly relieved that I've been able to do that. I've known fellow students who owe five-figure sums of money, and reckon they won't ever be able to pay it off. The grave will be their only release from debt. I feel sorry for them, knowing what will happen when P.O hits.