PowerSwitch

This waiting, worrying, postulating, planning, striving, learning is getting me down. Can we just be done with it and have Peak now before we all start suffering from mental health problems?

newmac wrote:This waiting, worrying, postulating, planning, striving, learning is getting me down. Can we just be done with it and have Peak now before we all start suffering from mental health problems?

It's possible that we wont see it as a distinct event or period. We might experience slowly degrading economical conditions, so slow that we hardly notice it. I think it's actually already happening since a number of years, and the poor are noticing it first - both nationally and internationally.

I suspect that by the time we are able to confidently say that "peak happened back in 20XX" we'll be too busy trying to sort out the mess we are in to bother.

I'd like more time please. I haven't finished enjoying hot showers.

Tess wrote:I'd like more time please. I haven't finished enjoying hot showers.

I second that! A lot more time please! I'm not someone who longs for the utopia of stress free homestead living, I like my hot showers too, and many other of the modern luxuries we'll lose after the Peak. Quite apart from the fact that I'm SO close to realising my dream of a career in theatre, which i'm sure will be one of first things to struggle post peak!

I look for ward to discussing ' how was peak oil for you?' with everybody in ...oh I dont know... shall we say 10 or 20 years time? I think we should have an adequate historical perspective on it by then - I'm fairly certain will at least have figured out to everyones satisfaction whether it has happened or not.

... I expect the internet will be some sort of fully immersive environment by 2026, finally living up to Williams Gibsons cyberpunk vison of the early '80's

I would like to stay pre-peak for a long time!

How about another 5 years please?

newmac wrote:This waiting, worrying, postulating, planning, striving, learning is getting me down. Can we just be done with it and have Peak now before we all start suffering from mental health problems?

Hear Hear!

I'm getting somewhat bored of the whole debate and just want it to happen. One thing PO has woken me up to is how we're destroying the planet, and I'd like it to stop as soon as possible. Also, the later the peak is the harder it will be, as there will be more people and more oil dependency. It'll be a lot easier persuading people of it when our economy is going into reverse, and it'll also give me the push to go 100% on my preparations. At the moment there's a variety of decisions I don't have enough information to make, and they'll be a lot clearer when things start to go wrong, just because of the timing.

We may already be close to a year after peak, May 2005 still holds the record for most productive month.

clv101 wrote:We may already be close to a year after peak, May 2005 still holds the record for most productive month.

I shall give a wry smile when the IEA start fixing production numbers by gradually including more and more unconventional ultra-heavy crude... Bit like Thatcher and unemployment stats.

mikepepler wrote:
I'm getting somewhat bored of the whole debate and just want it to happen.

Oh dear... You sound like somebody who knows that a 'dinosaur killler' class meteorite is sooner or later bound to hit the planet and wants it to happen now in order to 'get it over and done with' - never mind that it could involve human exinction.

I'd take a close look at your own situation and psychology on this one. Anybody who wishes what could be a potential disaster on their own heads has probably got personal problems in my book.

No I dont want it happen anytime soon. What I want is for it to happen as far into the future as possible. What I do want is for public awareness of the problem and a general move away from fossil energy use to ramp up as quickly as possible.

the consequences of an early peak and rapid decline could be lethal, both for people and the biosphere - people would burn any bit of biomass they could lay their hands on in order to stay alive in the cold. I'm no misanthropist or psychopath, as I suspect many doomers for their own sadly twisted reasons are. Its not something I would wish on my worst enemy.

I cannot wait for peak oil either, as long as the decline rate is 0.000000000000000000000000001% per year!

skeptik wrote:

mikepepler wrote:
I'm getting somewhat bored of the whole debate and just want it to happen.

Oh dear... You sound like somebody who knows that a 'dinosaur killler' class meteorite is sooner or later bound to hit the planet and wants it to happen now in order to 'get it over and done with' - never mind that it could involve human exinction.

I'd take a close look at your own situation and psychology on this one. Anybody who wishes what could be a potential disaster on their own heads has probably got personal problems in my book.

I was thinking more of avoiding a different disaster, which we are headed towards by default through the way we live on this planet, which is why I said:

One thing PO has woken me up to is how we're destroying the planet, and I'd like it to stop as soon as possible

The only thing I can see that has the power to knock us off the default course of self-destruction is peak oil. The tricky bit is, of course, how the world will react to this massive jolt to the way it normally operates. My feeling is that a century or two from now the people living on this planet will be a lot happier (though maybe fewer in number), but the problem is the gap in between - will it be war, famine, etc., or will we find a way to do it with minimum hardship to people round the world?

I must admit I have some doom-like tendancies, but at the same time I'm someone who quit my software job to train in renewable energy, runs my car on veg oil, tries to live in an envionmentally friendly way and is making an effort to strengthen the local community. That would imply that I think there'll be a functioning society to live and work in. I'm just not 100% sure...

As for wanting the whole thing to hurry up - I'm just finding it quite painful watching the whole thing unfold so slowly and nobody noticing. It feels like one of those (urban myth?) experiments where you boil a frog to death without it noticing by raising the water temperature very gradually. If we had a few short, sharp shocks then people might get motivated to do something. At the current rate of progress we're buggered, so something needs to change.

mikepepler wrote: It feels like one of those (urban myth?) experiments where you boil a frog to death without it noticing by raising the water temperature very gradually. If we had a few short, sharp shocks then people might get motivated to do something. At the current rate of progress we're buggered, so something needs to change.

Yes... I have to admit the 'short sharp shock thing' had occurred to me too... just enough to focus the attention without doing any serious longterm damage.

and yes... though its a nice metaphor, the boiling frog story is an urban myth. If you slowly heat up any amphibian it will gradually become more agitated and attempt to move away from the source of the heat - if in a pot of slowly heating water it will attempt to jump out in an increasingly frenetic manner... maybe theres a moral in that too!