Dear gentle friends. I have been quite busy of late and my posting has dropped off. Most topics seem like reruns. But the current poll, "When Did You Learn About Peak Oil?" Hit me like an electric shock. I am stunned. Aldous Huxley worried about the eventual depletion of fossil fuels in 1928, it has been a hot academic topic for fifty years.

At last count, 525/624 or 84% of you learned about peak oil after the year 2000. Ok, I will give anyone currently 25 or under a free pass on having no informed opinion in the last century. But age 21 is the traditional age of complete adulthood. If you are now aged 26 or older, you were 21 or older in the year 2000.

Now if only about 1/7 of people on this board who were adults by the year 2000 were aware of the peak oil concept back then - what were the rest of you thinking? I do not mean to insult or demean anyone, I am just full of curiosity. I had assumed that the people on this forum were much better informed than the average internet users, and fear that is still true.

From my (ok, elitist and priviliged) perspective of having a science education, I have always assumed that the concept that the planet's mineral resources were finite was pretty accessible. Consumption of a finite resource, even a renewable one (blue and right whales, old growth forests, american bison) leads to depletion when it is consumed faster than produced. Clearly, that concept is not so obvious to other people, even thoughtful literate ones. Even though we have seen several natural resources depleted beyond economic recovery in recent generations, most people didn't get that the same principle applied to fossil fuels. What is going on?

There are only a few alternatives to a serious peak oil crisis someday:
1) Oil (including for this thought experiment non-conventional oil, coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels) is being created as fast as we could possibly use it so it will never run out. Fossil fuels will be cheap and abundant forever, at any rate of consumption.
2) Renewable energy sources will be fully developed, online, and cheaper than oil/fossil fuels while oil/fossil fuels are still cheap.
3) Nuclear energy will be fully developed, online, and cheaper than oil/fossil fuels while oil/fossil fuels are still cheap.
4) A combination of 2) and 3); you thought that renewable energy+nuclear energy would become cheaper than oil/fossil fuels while oil/fossil fuels are still cheap.

So, people aged over 26 who didn't learn about the concept of peak oil until this century, please share with me what you were thinking back then. I promise not to be rude to anyone.

Some of us have Literature degrees. 'Nuff said.

I remember reading the "Limits to Growth" back in the 70's. I would say that this study was non-specific in that I only got the general idea that resources were limited, pollution and population were growing and that something eventually would give. I even went so far as to buy a farm in rural Missouri, abandon my suburban lifestyle and learn all I could about back to the land survival by doing first hand. Over the years, I almost forgot why I did this when nothing happened, but I did live a much more relaxed lifestyle and did learn a lot of backwoods survival.

I think people receive information continuously, and even if the information is understood, the full implications do not always register; all the implications cannot be integrated. Sometimes we become too involved in the day to day struggle of living to devote sufficient attention to future events, which also diverts energy away from more long term survival issues. I think that today there are many who do not have sufficient energy to pay the bills next week and also to look at bigger issues like peak oil.

It is only in the last 7 years that it has become very clear to me how the future will likely play out. I think that Richard Duncan's thoughts have most influenced me. Also my increasing understanding of the laws of nature as described in statistical principles helps me, in mathematical terms to understand that the current population levels are impossible to sustain and that the end does in fact come abruptly.

Maybe it is best that this is not anticipated by the overwhelming majority. What good would it have done to tell the entire sompliment of passengers on the Titanic of the impending sinking? Maybe it would have shifted around those who survived, but the overall loss of life would have been little altered. "Let them eat cake" for now and go to their graves without the anxiety of foreknowledge may be more kind approach. There are only so many lifeboats, the iceberg is approaching, and truly, this is a survival of the fittest drill being carried out by mother nature, only for real.

Doesn't really satisfy my curiosity. Was it like food comes from the grocery store, electricity from the wall socket, and gasoline from the service station? You never thought beyond that? You assumed that wise, kindly responsible adults were going to take care of things to ensure your abundant energy future forever? Isn't literature fully of stories about powerful people being full of greed, deception, and folly? What about Macbeth or Richard III?

Fair enough. I admit to having the same bleak thought at times.

Where was I in 2000? Not paying attention. I had a couple of theater degees, was living in Chicago, and was taking public transportation or walking for virtually all my transportation needs. I'm paying attention now.

Scoring a root

hi, i'm 31, and my 'shift' button doesn't work, so t here will be no capitalization in this reply.

funny thing was, i saw it coming. this piece of crap kickaround laptop is perfect for throwing in a backpack and getting in some coffee-house wifi because its a couple of years old and i got it for free. it's true- it was sitting in its carrying case on top of an old sofa in front of a house that had been recently vacated by its tenants. it had a busted screen, and i was able to power it up. over time i've spent about 200 dollars on a new screen, some decent used batteries, a wi-fi card, and a 'new' used keyboard.

its a dell inspiron 3800 and it sold for nearly 2000 dollars in late 2000. i was able to piece together a picture of the person that owned it, and the person that bought it by analysing the contents of the hard drive and oem sales literature which was conveniently stuffed inside the carrying case.

it seems a young woman was off to college in a new state across the country. evidently she 'needed' a laptop- which was purchased for her by her father, who paid the full retail price, even kicking in for a bigger 15 inch screen, which at some point between 2000 and 2004 was smashed in a manner that suggests a sudden bout of frustration and a straight punch at the middle of the screen.

an examination of the hard drive revealed an intact installation of windows 98, and very little in the way of 'intellectual property' save for an account with america online. her default username and password were still retained by aol's software, so i was able to access her aol email.

it seems that she was a young woman who quite confused. a series of letters back and forth between her and a young man... the details were typical and boring. what could be extracted from these exchanges is that she had at one time abused cocaine. it wasn't clear that it was the cause of the end of the relationship, as there were other factors suggested by some english class self-analysis essays where she went on about doubting her own sexuality and there were other emails suggesting a blossoming realization of her sexual feelings toward certain parties of the same gender.

anyway, at some point, daddy's little girl snorted coke, broke up with a boy who didn't know she was more into girls than boys, entered email into her computer which she honestly felt would never be read by anyone else, and punched the screen with enough force that the glass cracked, and left the whole package on the side of the road in a small college town on puget sound.

your question reminds me of the kinds of questions this whole thing raises...


1. would daddy have done anything differently had he known the computer would eventually be junk...

2. did daddy's little girl know in 2000 that by 2004 she would be a full blown homosexual...

3. did dell technical support know the laptop would not likely last past 2001 and curtail their warranty offer...

i guess the whole point is the world is full of reasonable expectations. it will rain tomorrow, a new car or laptop eventually gets old and decrepit, we will as people change and adapt to ourselves and out environments.

certainly it is as obvious to any reasonable person that oil is a finite resource whose availability will eventually disappear, in the same way as when i eat sausage, it will eventually be digested and i can't 'have' that sausage anymore or at least get anything useful from it.

but the fact is that when i was exploring my twenties, the lead up to that had been the 1980s... there was an oil glut, and frankly i was more worried about global thermonuclear war. at least when oil runs out, there won't be scary things like fallout stemming directly from it. when i was in my twenties, a thing called the internet came out, and bands like nirvana were blowing the doors off pop culture. gasoline was cheap and everyone was going to be a millionare internet startup.

yes, fact of oil depletion's eventuality was still true, but it was abstract. i knew nothing about oil manufacturing, and i was so poor i paid for gas in 5 dollar increments. i thought gulf war 1 was really about wmd, and even thought it was a good idea to attack iraq because the kuwaitis seemed like okay people. hindsight is 20/20.

i could not have even put a finger on when exactly the oil was supposed to run out... but it was within the range 2005-2025... roughly all the predictions from the eia and top peakers... so i didn't have bad information, it was just that the information was abstract to the point of uselessness.

what could i have done about it even if i perceived a problem... i was still struggling toward adulthood and trying to get laid and stoned... to me, global thermonuclear war was still the big kahuna, the problem that ultimately had the power to doom us all. so what if we ran out of gasoline...

i guess what it all boils down to is this... if a problem is abstract, why should we care. the sane thing to do is descend staircases in a relaxed and easy manner. the possibility of misstep and breaking our necks falling to the bottom is a real possibility, but it is abstract. after all, i am in perfect health.

health itself is an assumption that most of us realize we can take for granted even though we know it will not last forever. certainly for most people i see every day their own health is the furthest thing from their minds even as i see physical decay creeping in at the edges, diminished capability. how is it that i will make the decision not to smoke, or eat poorly, or not exercise, when so many around me take such behavior as the norm...

could it be that throat cancer, limited mobility, and a poorer quality of life are predictable but clearly abstract probabilities in light of the enthralling preoccupations of the now....

only someone who had throat cancer can actually appreciate being able to draw a breath effortlessly.

so in an era of human history where you would have to look hard to find a place to be where there wasn't ever-growing amounts of energy or sources of energy, youre going to have to look even harder to find someone who actually appreciates being able to use just a little energy...

i really dont think people are going to confront the issue until it is no longer abstract. that is, when they wake up in the morning and realize they had to walk home last night at 7 because the lincoln navigator ran out of gas coming home from work and there were no spare tow trucks to come haul it home, and how the hell am i going to get to work in the morning, etc.

so anyway, to wrap up- what was i thinking...

i was thinking i could run the country a hell of a lot better than anyone that was currently running it. i knew that the people at the top were crooks and everyone underneath the pig-pile were trapped in the system, and forced to slap their own faces, in the way an older brother will sit on your chest and pin your arms at your side and make you slap your own face.

i was also thinking about a girl i would someday meet that would be 'right' for me and everything would be great because she would totally accept me for who i was, as i would accept her totally, and then we might have children or something.

i also thought the world would recognize the quality of my abilities and reward my contributions out of hand with money and fame.

thanks for the thought-provoking question... i've enjoyed answering it.

In 2000? Just started work not too far back, smack at the tail end of the dotcom boom. Wasn't much aware of the boom even, not to mention peak oil etc. Which explains why I didn't make any money in that boom (didn't know about it), and why I didn't lose any money either (was completely out of the markets, heck, didn't even know about the markets). Complete financial dodo then.

Where did oil come from? Shrug. Father pumped petrol into his car then, and that was it. Didn't even see the stuff unless a couple of drops spilled from the nozzle or something. It was cheap too then, the premium RON98 stuff cost less than the regular RON92 grade today. Didn't bother with mid-grade or regular-grade.

Only had a vague idea that oil and other resources were finite, yes, they would probably run out, yes, but hey wasn't that going to be in the distant future? Like a hundred years or something?

What did I know? That Brunei had oil. That Indonesia had oil. That Malaysia had palm oil.

Shrug. They don't teach that stuff in school anyway. And what did I learn outside of school then? The fine art of self-defence in a cyberwarfare scenario. Uh-huh. How to talk to an intrusion detection engine. Yep. Stuff like that.

Wasn't until 2003, that, deep in debt (loans for house, car, renovation, etc), decided that I wanted to find out how this world really works.

I was 14 back in 2000. I learned about PO and studied it in 2002. Not so coincidentally, that is when I started planning my electric car and seriously thought about what I wanted to do. I'm now majoring in electrical engineering, and further research has brought me to the conclusion that a crisis from peak oil can largely be prevented. I asked myself why it isn't happening, and then started delving into the politics of the situation: the oil industry, other corporations, and federal governments all want to maximize growth and profits, at all costs.

Even though sustainable lifestyles and alternatives could grant us about the same(or better) living standards compared to today, oil alternatives are routinely supressed because by their nature they REDUCE consumption for a given amount of output. This is turn lowers growth, in turn lowering profit, despite achieving the same standard of living for everyone if managed properly.

Our little crisis is somewhat manufactured, someone the result of geology, but if nothing is done before the crisis point is reached, we are fucked. I guess you could call me a 'moderate'. I'm a doomer as far as the implications of peak oil are concerned, a realist when it comes to the technology I am studying quite extensively at the moment, and an optimist when it comes to humanity's ability to cooperate under the condition the few that refuse to cooperate are dealt with.

In theory, we could prevent a massive dieoff by properly allocating the diminishing oil supply to agriculture and making ourselves less dependent on oil. In practice, lets just say that I'm no fortune teller. Certain industries do not want consumption of their product to decrease, such as the oil industry. Said industry wants peak to be as bad a crisis as possible because that will drive the cost per barrel up the highest, and thus drive revenue the highest and profits the highest. Thus there exists three inperatives for this industry, hold back alternatives to keep up oil consumption, get as many people as possible dependent upon their product, and hold out the plateau for peak as long as possible to induce a sharp decline(the plateau + sharp decline garunteeing maximized profit).

Needless to say, said industry cares less about all the people that will be hurt as a result. They ould very well have the blood of billions on their hands.

I'm 31, and I vividly remember my elementary school teachers in the early eighties explaining that oil was a limited resource and we would be running out by the year 2000 (seemed a long way off back then). I suppose it was a hot topic at the time.

That knowledge never really left me, but like most people, I imagine, I figured that there were experts in the energy field monitoring the supply and working on alternatives. I did not look deeply into the subject and current events rarely put much focus on it.

My real wake up call came in 2003 when I was living in Singapore. During that year I made a friend who worked for another company in the same building I was working in. That company was Saudi Petroleum. He had quite a number of thoughts on the subject, but I was most affected by his urgency to make and save money while he could still do it easily.

At the same time, the price of oil became a hot topic of conversation and was brought up repeatedly in my travels around the region - particularly in China. That really got my attention, particularly since oil had not been a concern during most of my lifetime.

Most people tended to brush these concerns aside, but I never forgot was I was told in elementary school, so perhaps I was more sensitive to the information. My concerns spurred me to research and into the Internet back-alleys of Peak Oil. My initial look at Peak Oil was to debunk the idea that it was a concern during my lifetime. I couldn't do it - the numbers are clear on the trend, if not the timing.

Since then, my life has become very focused on "battening down the hatches". I will reach a point where I am reasonably well prepared for financial upheavals in a couple of years. I have tried to inform my friends and family, but very few have any interest. My youngest brother will actually leave the room if I bring the matter up. So, I do what I can to prepare to help my friends and family in the future as well.

Most people don't want to hear about peak oil and so they simply won't. Based on my experience, I would imagine you could not convince more than 1% of people to do anything about peak oil, even if you laid out all the data before them. Most people are not critical thinkers. Most people do not subscribe to the scientific method. Most people are specialists, who have no need to develop a well rounded understanding of the global economy. Most people have no understanding of economics at all. Without this basic knowledge, their understanding of world politics and their place in the world is distorted. Only harsh reality will correct this lack of knowledge. Sadly, now, when the economy is still relatively strong, it is easy to prepare for a harder life. Once the lesson is learned, preparation will be much more difficult; impossible for many.

Thank you very much for your thoughtful answer. This might hold the best answer to the riddle. Most people had some vague awareness that oil production would go into decline someday. But they had more immediate problems to deal with, so the not yet personal problem of oil depletion was pushed to the back of their minds.

So perhaps everybody in the late 20th century did sort of understand the concept of oil depletion. Their poll responses that refer to the year when they "learned" about peak oil, was that was when they realized it was going to affect them personally and pretty soon?

Yikes, that explains a lot. I will turn 50 in December, and it is increasingly clear to me that the sort of university education I had may not even exist anymore.

Old school education in liberal arts was focused on how to reason. The classics were taught, often with Greek or Latin requirements. Belive it or not, even good public high schools in the US were still teaching Latin to university bound students in the 1960s. Skills were developed in reasoned debate - no logical fallacies, ad hominem attacks, arguments from authority, or straw man arguments allowed by the judges.

Old school science education was about the scientific method. In other words, we weren't taught to memorize facts or what to think. We were taught how to think, how to ask questions about our world. Curiosity was encouraged.

It seems by the dotcom era, education was increasingly vocationally focused - teaching people skills to serve the corporate labor market. Perhaps the new corporate dominated universities produce people with excellent technical skills but failed miserably to develop the capacity for independent critical thought? Perhaps on purpose, to make skilled labor more manageable by corporate masters?

This needs to change. Wealth might be elusive in the future, but freedom is still precious. Freedom begins with freedom of thought.

That, I can relate to. I was 12 when The Population Bomb came out, 14 when the first Earth Day was held, and 16 when Limits to Growth was published. So even as teenagers, I and all of my friends pretty much knew the score. We knew that the 21st century was going to be a mess of economic and demographic decline with lots of wars. That was even dealt with in the original (1966-1969) Star Trek. In Gene Roddenberry's future history, the 21st century was a horrible dark age. One episode had a recreation of Colonel Greene, basically an American 21st century military dictator and war criminal. Much like the neocon leadership the US has now.

We all fought the machine as well as we could in the 1970s. I worked on the 2nd annual human powered vehicle competition in 1977 myself. But we collapsed in despair in the ugly 1980s, and retreated to quiet lives, to muddle through as best we could.

Was always aware that resources would run out, but I bought the statistic that apparently “at current consumption trends we have around 40 years of oil left”. Well, why should I worry about something 40 years away?

Then about a year ago I discovered the (now obvious) logic that oil doesn’t need to completely run out for problems to start. All that’s needed is a supply shortage.

You can’t be too hard on people that don’t understand peak oil (and there are a lot of them). After all, we have all been raised in a world where everyone is trying to brainwash us to consume and ignore the consequences.