PowerSwitch RIP

[kenneal - lagger]

At least johnny is enjoying this thread!!

[johnny]

At least johnny is enjoying this thread!!

More like, watching the end of an era. The thunder and fury of new and exciting and scientific-like, the knife edge tension of the wait, preparations....the tension turning into life, and then...more...BAU...and more...BAU...a slow decay in interest...hangers on finding other means of triggering Rapture they have been waiting for...substituing other ideas not quite as cool (if not lions and tigers then it must be bears!) ...until one day...like the air coming out of a balloon...nothing but...deafening silence. The passing of an age. Somewhat of a bummer of course, for both the folks who have to now search and find the next neat idea to use as a means to the end, and to the others who made their bones off knowing better in the first place. No one is going to be interested in either gang any more.

Life goes on.

[kenneal - lagger]

Like I said!!

[Mark]

I know that I shouldn't feed the troll (RGR/Johnny)...

The issues surrounding Peak Oil are just as real and current and the fossil fuel industry is still just as bad for mankind as when PowerSwitch was set up - we're still fighting wars over oil, we're still open cast mining, the climate crisis continues to worsen, plastics increasing clog our waterways and oceans, etc. etc. etc...

On the positive, the world has steadily taken up alternatives such as solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars etc. etc.
Maybe faster than we expected, but certainly not as quickly as required or indeed quickly enough to outpace the upward curves in global temperatures and population growth...

So, a PowerSwitch voice is still valid - probably more so now than ever before...
But we have to accept reality - this PowerSwitch Forum is not gaining any traction.....
We're down to maybe a dozen regular contributors, so we should ask ourselves why ?

Is an internet forum now out-of-date, even for our aging (pale, male & stale) demographic ?
I feel that we're now just like a group of 'Victor Meldrews' sitting in the corner of the pub chuntering to ourselves...
Granted, younger folk will be attracted to other organisations, such as Greenpeace, XR, Just Stop Oil etc., but we're not even getting older folks...

In short, if we're to continue, we need to attract more people to join and contribute to the debate...
I'm sure there's plenty out there who have views on the subjects under discussion...
Suggestions on a postcard...

[johnny]

I know that I shouldn't feed the troll (RGR/Johnny)...

The issues surrounding Peak Oil are just as real and current and the fossil fuel industry is still just as bad for mankind as when PowerSwitch was set up - we're still fighting wars over oil, we're still open cast mining, the climate crisis continues to worsen, plastics increasing clog our waterways and oceans, etc. etc. etc...

Peak oil was never about wars across the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, or terrible mining practices or the climate change that would continue without or without oil involved because it is all about human behavior. So if it isn't the extra CO2 the world produces, it would be plastics in our blood streams and pretending biomass burning is clean and deforestation, and so on and so forth. Oil is just one of the useful things we pollute the biosphere with, important, but there are others we would happily continue using if it wasn't around.

Peak oil was a means to an end. Just another round of Apocalypticism. Anyone remember the Mayan calendar nonsense, and Planet X stuff going around at the same time? Same thing, except peak oil had that veneer of credibility because Colin and ASPO didn't LOOK like poorly informed folks, right? Folks had PhD's! And were geologists!

The issues surrounding peak oil are real. Not the means to an end for doomers and back to the earthers, save the biosphere types, but as a terribly interesting technical problem.

On the positive, the world has steadily taken up alternatives such as solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars etc. etc.
Maybe faster than we expected, but certainly not as quickly as required or indeed quickly enough to outpace the upward curves in global temperatures and population growth...

Those things are on the positive side, I completely agree. all of the new less CO2 emissions ideas probably are. The only thing you need to know about effective human action to date is the one metric that will tell us in a month or 3 that we have FINALLY instituted effective action.

Take a look. How effective have our actions been on just one, but a BIG one, side effect of our bad behavior? Can you see decreases from those EVs and solar panels and whatnot?

We're down to maybe a dozen regular contributors, so we should ask ourselves why ?

The same reason a lawyer who's apocalytic peak oil claims were discussed on the floor of the US Congress 15+ years ago became an astrologer and ended up working as a substitute teacher as of late. More oil came along and demonstrated that folks who liked peak oil claims didn't understand the requisite sciences involved well enough to do anything other than to just....believe.

I feel that we're now just like a group of 'Victor Meldrews' sitting in the corner of the pub chuntering to ourselves...
Granted, younger folk will be attracted to other organisations, such as Greenpeace, XR, Just Stop Oil etc., but we're not even getting older folks...

It took 20+ years between Jimmy Carter proclaiming the world was running out of oil by the end of the 1980's to Colin and Jean launching another round in writing "The End of Cheap Oil". Give it time, higher prices not so far off in the future, a global downturn that oil looks to be involved with, and it'll fire up all over again I'll bet. The legions will show up again, slapping bell shaped curves on everything they can find, repeating the same mantra as well. I'd bet a paycheck the cheerleading of peak oil next time won't even stop to explain why it didn't work out all those other times, but just motor on to bell shaped curves because they are just so easy. Solving peak oil takes someone who knows how, hard work, a budget, all the information commercially available and some damn fine computer programmers and....3 years? Just speculating on the potential effort of course.

In short, if we're to continue, we need to attract more people to join and contribute to the debate...
I'm sure there's plenty out there who have views on the subjects under discussion...
Suggestions on a postcard...

Wouldn't it just be easier to move on into better reasons for why simple living, farming, an agrarian community using less hydrocarbons, living simply and sell lifestyle changes with THAT instead of getting involved in a tangled mess that hasn't worked and isn't needed? Is convincing folks to live in a more simple and cooperative way so difficult that rogue planets and Mayan calendars and peak oils are needed to scare them into climbing onboard with what we REALLY should all be aiming at?

[BritDownUnder]

I am still around but at the moment working on the commissioning of a fossil fueled power station in Australia. Hence no posts.

The shortage of oil has been alleviated by the gradual introduction of renewables, the Covid19 pandemic and increased technology resulting in the recovery of previously non-recoverable oil deposits moving the peak a bit higher and a bit farther into the future. We may get peak lithium before peak oil - who'd a thunk it? The price of coal that Australia sells has never been higher. Solar regularly supplies more than half of Australia's midday power usage. I am getting my second Tesla battery to absorb the afternoons solar generation.

On the downside the earth continues to warm. I think the 1 degree increase since whenever the base point was defined is supposedly nearly here and 90% of the heat is being absorbed by the oceans.

Temperature record continue to get broken except in Australia which last month dropped the worlds average temperature due to a cold snap here. Global warming will supposedly make Australia wetter as well as warmer.

I'd like it to stay but it has become a bit of a haven for deniers and pro-Russian useful idiots of late who have some time on their hands. Not as useful for preparations as it used to be. The ad hominen attacks favoured by the left have had their effect.

[johnny]

I am still around but at the moment working on the commissioning of a fossil fueled power station in Australia. Hence no posts.

I thought the story from most of the developed world was how to NOT do that? Australia doesn't have enough sun, wind or can't build a nuke or three?

The shortage of oil......

Since...when...? Are there consistent shortages Down Under that the rest of the world has missed?

...has been alleviated by the gradual introduction of renewables, the Covid19 pandemic and increased technology resulting in the recovery of previously non-recoverable oil deposits moving the peak a bit higher and a bit farther into the future. We may get peak lithium before peak oil - who'd a thunk it?

The people who knew that the so called "non-recoverable oil deposits" were not only no such thing but were personally involved in "recovering" them back in the 80's? You can't claim everyone was poorly informed in terms of the geology and engineering, the history of oil and gas development, all of that is mostly just on the McPeaksters.

[Mark]

On the downside the earth continues to warm. I think the 1 degree increase since whenever the base point was defined is supposedly nearly here and 90% of the heat is being absorbed by the oceans.

https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/ho ... 022-11-14/

IPCC scientists agree that temperatures have now risen at least 1.2C above pre-industrial times - but warming is not spread evenly around the globe. On land, temperatures have already risen about 1.5C - more than over the bigger, cooler oceans - and the northern hemisphere is particularly warm, with Europe having seen about 2C of warming and the Arctic 3C. "The amplification gets stronger the further north you go," Rockström explained.

[emordnilap]

Ocean temperatures off the west coast of Ireland are alarmingly above normal. This is getting frightening.

[johnny]

Ocean temperatures off the west coast of Ireland are alarmingly above normal. This is getting frightening.

What might you be afraid of? Humans have made a decision to pollute the biosphere, and one of those forms of pollution directly contributes to higher temperatures. We know this. We can see it in the data. And we don't care enough to do anything about it. It is unlikely that ocean temperatures themselves are what frighten you. My guess is that you are afraid of the expected consequences? That is the most logical explanation I can think of anyway.

So lets run the script forward farther. I presume you are frightened by the ultimate consequence, i.e. you die. Your family dies, friends die, country dies, other countries die, species goes extinct. Dying is frightening. But not ocean temperatures.

Dying strikes me as a depressing thought, but honestly, anyone who hasn't figured out yet that being born comes with a guarenteed death sentence is a moron. So...once a human accepts that..well...why be afraid of the WHY? Some might be more gruesome than others obviously, and more gruesome rather than peaceful in one's sleep would suck. And gruesome is personal, one person's gruesome is another persons lifetime passion, painting themselves in goats blood and swimming with sharks, whatever. Higher temperatures are higher temperatures. Strikes me that knowing that none of us gets out of here alive, regardless of ocean temperatures, that a life well lived is the best revenge against the Gods and humanities urge to self-immolate.

[Potemkin Villager]

Might it not be possible to email a brief questionnaire to recent joiners who have gone quiet and longer term members who have faded away
to try and fathom the issues?

[emordnilap]

At least johnny is enjoying this thread!!

Who?

[kenneal - lagger]

At least johnny is enjoying this thread!!

Who?

Sorry!! RGR.

[RevdTess]

I still occasionally come back to PS to see what the current topic of conversation is, and it would be sad to see it die.

Back in the beginning I joined because I was just starting out as an oil market analyst in 2004 and had access to individual oil field production data and forecasts and I was fascinated by what might happen to the economy and society if supply of energy (and oil in particular) couldn't be increased to meet demand, especially since the prevailing thought at that time was that supply was boundless with the right investment.

Of course I was only an analyst for five years and then left for more spiritual pursuits, partly as a reaction to the dodgy nature of energy markets and associated pollutions. Even when I was a nun for a couple of years, I couldn't really escape being part of the system, but I wanted to find a more communal and compassionate way to live.

My experience of this forum has been that I have enjoyed the people and characters more than the increasingly dismissive and arrogant posts. Many times I've dreaded seeing the replies to my own comments as the responses are often so mocking and cruel. Often the best I could hope for was to be ignored as I hadn't annoyed anyone enough to respond!

It's possible it always been like this and I've just gone soft as I moved from working in an aggressive intellectual individualist business to a wishy washy soft emotional communal business, but it does feel to me that over the past twenty years this forum has gone from being predominantly progressive and hippyish to mostly individualist survivalist. Of course, those with minority views will always get shouted down or chased off unless they're hard as nails, so membership is always going to look homogenous in the end. It's the same in the churches of course, where the majority are old, white and conservative, and you'll only really feel welcome if you're the same.

Back in 2004 when I lived near PowerswitchJames, we even had a stall at the local summer fair and tried to raise awareness about the consequences of excessive energy use. A couple of years later I was talking about eco-communities and cohousing opportunities with a couple of guys on here, who were very much from the eco-socialist side of things. The 'Green' movement always had a tension between eco hippies, primitivists, survivalists and conservatives (in the literal sense). These all see the same issues in society but imagine different causes and long for different solutions. When the focus was on the awfulness of modern society, we all tended to agree. When the conversation became about what to do about it, we didn't.

Of course, we're all now 20 years older than when PS started. I was in my early thirties. I'm now in my early fifties and my focus has shifted to how I might retire. I'm finally buying a house next to a loch in Scotland in a strong community. I won't be able to live there for a little while, but I'm looking forward to at least having a few years in a peaceful and beautiful place before I get too old to be mobile. It's not an eco-home by any means, at least not yet, but I'm mostly seeking a place of peace for my latter years, not one of ideological purity - I'll leave that to the younger generations, as everyone has before me and no doubt after me.

If the PS forums dies, I'll be sad, but only because I see you as my companions on this journey, and I'd like to know how our stories end. Maybe a private FB group is a good idea. I'd like that. I've no idea what we'd call it as I've no idea if we have anything in common any more except our shared memories of this place and the many dramas it has brewed. Even after twenty years I've still no idea who most of you really are. I'm convinced though that in person we'd probably get on pretty well.

Best wishes to you all, Tess. x

[Forever_Winter]

LOL - God knows what's going on with this site I tried logging in as automaticearth, automaticearth2, with no success.

I tried resetting my password, and got an email as expected, but the username was reset back to Forever_Winter which was a username / account that got blitzed when the site was attacked by the 'bots back in the mid-2000s.

So from now on, I'll be posting under my original username