dolph9 wrote:I'm a 34 year old physician and I can tell you that I never meet doomers. Wherever they are, I for one certainly missed the invitation.
The physicians all think supplies are inexhaustible, they deserve everything they have and patients should suck it up and pay, and that the right cocktail of drugs and procedures will keep every patient alive forever.
We are all trained to think like that, it's an echo chamber that can't be changed. Despite the fact that we are around disease and death all of the time! Talk about cognitive dissonance.
GHung wrote:Absolutely, and it isn't just peak oil. It's a systemic confluence of things; financial, environmental, societal... that will be heavily influenced by peak oil. Peak oil = peak everything, except for delusion and denial. Reading the comments, it seems the author may have compartmentalized peak oil as a standalone issue.
pstarr wrote:So what your point there tom_s2? Could it be that the earth is an infinite source of happiness, human ingenuity and our brilliance will always trump planetary limits? Is that it, Major Tom?
It's interesting as history.
I actually bought the book this morning, and I've read about half of it. It's pretty good. Some of it is less convincing; for example, the stuff about the peak oil idea being an attempt to reinstitute traditional gender roles, was kinda out there. However there were other more valid connections drawn in the book, such as the connections between the peak oil movement and the "back to the land" movement and survivalist/doomsday movements from the 1970s. Many of the classics around here such as "Limits to Growth", "Overshoot", and so on, were written in the 1970s.
I've always been surprised that this group never got much academic or media attention. Granted, it got some brief media attention back in the heyday of peak oil prepping around 2007 or so. Back then, there were articles in Harper's Monthly, the NY Times magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and others. Right after that, however, peak oil just dropped off the radar. It was never mentioned after that, in any conventional media outlet. The only remark I heard after that was from Paul Krugman (of NY Times op-ed fame) who opined in 2010 that peak oil was probably upon us but would definitely not cause the collapse of civilization. He devoted a few sentences to it, then moved on.
This group has never really had any kind of retrospective on what it meant. There was an entire social group consisting of thousands (or even tens of thousands) who were preparing for doomsday, and it was just ignored by everyone else. When civilization didn't abruptly collapse circa 2009, most peak oilers (it seems) just quietly dropped it and went back to their lives. Most of the big peak oil websites closed down without much commentary, and the whole thing was forgotten.
My reason for being here is that I find doomsday groups to be fascinating. What I find particularly interesting is how groups will respond when their predictions have clearly failed, especially when those predictions were made in a tone of total certainty or were believed without hesitation ("it's just a matter of basic thermodynamics", etc). To be sure, most members leave the group when the predictions fail, but some people stay. I always wondered why.
I'm glad somebody wrote a book about this. Otherwise the peak oil doom thing from 2005-2010 could have been just forgotten about, or lost to history. A lot of people are unaware of just how MANY doomsday groups there have been in the US over the years. It's interesting as history.
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