When did you first learn of peak oil?

[ceti331]

http://life.enhasa.org/wp-content/uploa ... Future.pdf

elsewhere on this very forum I've read the claim:-
"we only know about peak oil from the internet, which we didn't used to have!!"
..which I think is BS.

This book was printed 1979.
I loved this book when i was a kid .. everything communicated with star-wars imagery right at the heart of my cultural template (check out the near copyright infringing battlestar inspired ship on the cover, the astromech droid early on etc)

It explains the Malthusian issue on page 16
it explains that fossil fuels dependance would create a future hell on pages 38, again with malthusian reference.

Before the nostalgia hit of seeing this PDF on the web, I remembered the simple emotive double page spread ('cars will make the sky brown'), and my earliest specific recollection of fuel *depletion* is the steam train described on page 74: I recall being extremely disappointed to read predictions of a return to steam trains in a book who's cover promised spaceships

Of course the book doesn't explain exponential *economic* growth and PEAK oil, just the common sense that growing population and fuel depletion would cause a problem "in the early C21st"

So this was why I was frustrated with the mainstream. My younger brother dismisses Peak Oil: "it sounds nonsense like global warming". My Mum appreciates oil is finite but says... "it won't affect you! it won't run out in the next 40 years!"
then other acquaintances still don't connect energy to the economy, or current events. they view them as separate things. It's all about bankers and capitalism.

It seems the knowledge has always been with us, and for decades we've just careered toward this dead ... because most people ignored it? or didn't think it was important? or too far off ? not their problem? (not seeing how their own personal choices create car dependance when none existed in the past)

arrgghhh

(at least the e-commerce and portable communicators turned out better than predicted though )

[Oxenstierna]

Wow! Thanks for the blast from the past. Fantastic graphic design.

Like you, I was a child of the 70s and although I didn't go down the science route I did ask questions like 'what are we going to do when the oil runs out?

By the age of about 17 I was also aware of population growth statistics. I also fell under the spell of the American poet Robinson Jeffers who I think could be described as an early exponent of deep ecology.

As for the actual term "peak oil" - I'm sure I've only been aware of it since 2006 or 2007. I am pretty sure I came to it from Ran Prieur's blog. He doesn't write a great deal these days, but his essay "How to drop out" influenced me a lot.

[RenewableCandy]

Oh yes I remember the days when "Nuclear Fusion (was) the most likely oil replacement"

By a curious coincidence, I think 1979 was the year of maximum "energy used per person in world population". Mentioned in "The Party's Over".

[ceti331]

By a curious coincidence, I think 1979 was the year of maximum "energy used per person in world population". Mentioned in "The Party's Over".

have we increased in efficiency since then (e.g telecoms)
or was that american domestic peak curve blended with world,
or was that due to more rapid growth of 3rd world low energy populations relative to 1st world population growth leveling off

[RenewableCandy]

Mainly the third of those, I suspect.

[UndercoverElephant]

Nobody predicted the internet though. I think I can remember people talking about having one giant computer that everybody could access to get information about all sorts of things, but the internet has turned out to be far more important than that.

[ceti331]

Nobody predicted the internet though. I think I can remember people talking about having one giant computer that everybody could access to get information about all sorts of things, but the internet has turned out to be far more important than that.

I like to look at the internet as a form of super-intelligence (hivemind) - an elaborate interconnect between human minds as component cells.

the market was already this, as were books, but the internet is much faster.

it was interesting going back over the predictions of "Risto's" in the usborne book. and the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy had a pretty good animated wiki.
From a PO perspective, the use of telecoms to reduce travel is the important bit. Thats' in the book (teleconferencing, ristos)

i guess other than that , the internet is just a fusion/mass-production/speed-up of things that were always predicted or existed... video phones, etc

if there's any hope for humanity, it's in modifying the human condition with AI/biotech I think, more likely than space colonization for ever increasing numbers.

[lurker]

Primary school geography class.

We learn't about renweable & non renwable fuels. Oil being a non renwable so the basic premise of peak oil was a no brainer. The term peak oil i think i first heard alot later, i can't remember exactly when. It wasn't a revelation/shock it just was another name for something i'd always understood to be the case.

[Keela]

Ditto lurker.

[JohnB]

I think I learned about it by meeting several PowerSwitchers in real life .

[Ludwig]

http://life.enhasa.org/wp-content/uploa ... Future.pdf

elsewhere on this very forum I've read the claim:-
"we only know about peak oil from the internet, which we didn't used to have!!"
..which I think is BS.

This book was printed 1979.
I loved this book when i was a kid .. everything communicated with star-wars imagery right at the heart of my cultural template (check out the near copyright infringing battlestar inspired ship on the cover, the astromech droid early on etc)

Fantastic! Usborne books were brilliant, and this was one of my all-time favourites! I can still remember the smell of it! I remember upon reading it thinking, "If oil's going to start running out that soon, isn't it, like, a massive problem? And why is nobody talking about it?"

And of course as I embarked on adulthood nobody continued to talk about it and I assumed it wasn't as immediate problem as had been portrayed.

The older I get, the more I think children have a wisdom that adults lose.

It explains the Malthusian issue on page 16
it explains that fossil fuels dependance would create a future hell on pages 38, again with malthusian reference.

Funny thing is, I remember reading page 38 and thinking that even the positive vision of the future sounded somehow arid and soulless. Surely there is more to life than commuting to work past groves of trees in a comfortable monorail? I can't say I've found what it is, though.

So this was why I was frustrated with the mainstream. My younger brother dismisses Peak Oil: "it sounds nonsense like global warming". My Mum appreciates oil is finite but says... "it won't affect you! it won't run out in the next 40 years!"
then other acquaintances still don't connect energy to the economy, or current events. they view them as separate things. It's all about bankers and capitalism.

Yeah, I can't get ANYONE interested in Peak Oil; some say, "That sounds grim", but they don't seriously think it's anything they personally should start planning for.

And as you say, they don't make the connection between economics and oil.

It seems the knowledge has always been with us, and for decades we've just careered toward this dead ... because most people ignored it? or didn't think it was important? or too far off ? not their problem? (not seeing how their own personal choices create car dependance when none existed in the past)

I think we careered towards it because the people with the power to stop it preferred to take the easy route of planning to save their own arses while letting the world in general go to hell in a handcart.

I read somewhere recently a rumour that they do psychological profiling at the top levels of corporations, to weed out psychopaths. The psychopaths are the ones who get the jobs. (Realistically, I'm sure there's more to it than that!)

[UndercoverElephant]

Primary school geography class.

We learn't about renweable & non renwable fuels. Oil being a non renwable so the basic premise of peak oil was a no brainer. The term peak oil i think i first heard alot later, i can't remember exactly when. It wasn't a revelation/shock it just was another name for something i'd always understood to be the case.

I think the term "peak oil" is associated with a group of ideas that are more complex than just "oil is going to start running out one day." I too was generally aware of the situation from very early in my life (I was born in 1968), but without the emphasis on how the peak in production would mark a fundamental tipping point. This is one of the things that people who don't understand peak oil get wrong all the time - they can't comprehend that once you pass the peak, all sorts of other things start changing in major ways. I think I first encountered the term in about 1999.

[jonny2mad]

1972 my father explained the whole thing to me, he started by telling me all the things we do with oil, then that america had reached peak production and would decline as a world power and that it wouldn't effect him much but it really would effect me ,

Basically he talked about the plot of the mad max films about 10 years before they were made .

I was 8

"cannibal hordes jonny its going to be mighty bad"

And in the years since I've seen nothing to make me think he was wrong

[ceti331]

This is one of the things that people who don't understand peak oil get wrong all the time - they can't comprehend that once you pass the peak, all sorts of other things start changing in major ways. I think I first encountered the term in about 1999.

Sure, in adult life there were the 2 events of the housing bubble and the iraq war.
I put 2 and 2 together and figured out a malthusian outlook (why don't we live in inherited homes?), and that oil must be 'very important' if 'they' are willing to lie in a supposed democracy to go to war to get it.
Mortgages never made any sense to me (i was always a skeptic of the original 1way bet idea, then watched in horror as prices shot up)... but I still didn't understand the debt-bubble issue until recently.

It's about that time (early 2000's) that I encountered the peak oil material on the internet - and the 2billion figure- which I found easy to believe with reference to childhood influences such as the book above.

For most of the 2000's I tried to explain to people '2 out of every 3 people owe their existence to oil' to why it started wars, which came as news to them.

What i'm finding frustrating is how people don't get the people v resources aspect of the economy. They seem to think if everyone justs works harder painting each others nails things will be ok.
or they even believe that rather silly story that we're waiting for oil prices to rise to incentives alternatives, 'no need to build alternatives whilst it's cheaper to dig energy up!'

it was encountering the Matt Savinar document ("the peak oil and die off") that really put the doom in me, explaining how much modern tech simply might not be viable at all without oil, let alone simply scarcer.

Yeah, I can't get ANYONE interested in Peak Oil; some say, "That sounds grim"

they just seem to doubt that it's important or significant.
arrrghhh.

[mobbsey]

Sometime in the mid-80s -- found a copy of Gerald Foley's book, 'The Energy Question' (published 1976), in a second hand shop. That wetted my interest and a little while later I found Peter Chapman's book, 'Fuel's Paradise' (published 1975), which apart from explaining Hubbert goes into things like limits on uranium production, peak copper, etc.

When travelling around, especially in more hippieish places, I always stopped off at second hand bookshops as you could find a wonderful range of "old knowledge" to inspire new ideas.

What I've always thought strange is that when I went to CAT around '79, and other similar events (e.g. Leamington Peace Fair), no one was focussing on the details of why industrial society had "limits" -- they just stated the fact without substantiation. We don't have that restriction today; there's reams of reports and data. But still no group, not even the Greens or the major campaign groups, wants to communicate the details of why "limits" will end growth/industrial development.