PowerSwitch

At the last meeting of our Oil Awareness group, one concern seemed to be shared by everyone present: ”why don’t they get it?”. What members are referring to is the feeling that colleagues, government, officers of authorities just don’t seem to ”get” the significance of:
1) the vast amounts of energy we are using to sustain daily life
2) the sources of this energy are rapidly depleting
3) our current economic system is dependent on them

I know why they don’t get it. If you are interested in knowing bear with me. I need to tell you a few stories first.

When Christopher Columbus arrived in what is now America, natives standing on the shore did not see the ships approaching. The explanation is that they had never encountered anything like it in their life before, and their brain simply did not register it. A priest noticed strange wave patterns (the wake of the boats) and stared at them trying to make sense of them. Eventually he saw the ships, called others to him, and they stated to see the ships too.

The other story is of research I have read into perception. Researchers showed rather upper class middle aged women a series of pictures and words rapidly, and asked them to remember them. Interspersed with “ordinary” words were foul language expressions of the sort these ladies would never use. Interestingly when asked, these subjects remembered all the ordinary words but were certain they never saw the foul ones.
Obviously they “saw” the words, but in terms of perception, like the natives on the shores of America, they did not “register” them.
Countless other experiments and stories illustrate the same thing: that people do not always perceive what they are seeing. Sometimes because it is outside their experience, sometimes because to see it would change them in some way.

This is a powerful mechanism. People often do not perceive things in situations where their position in society, for example their job, would be threatened.

So why do our neighbors, politicians, not “get” the significance of the peaking of oil production and the consequences for life on Earth?

One reason is because it is not in their life experience to even contemplate a serious, long term global energy shortage. Another is that their jobs, position in society etc depend on it. You have to remember that we are flock animals. In our DNA, our wiring, is that exclusion means death.

For sustainable development fanatics this can have drastic consequences. Say, as a friend of the environment, you start to think how the bus lane over a narrow bridge into town could be used to promote lift –sharing. Say every car with three or more passengers would be allowed the fast route past the queues.
Good for the environment… so you think of proposing it. But, the unseen forces of flock pressure will work against you. Think about it…. That could be a third of the cars used, a third of the petrol, a third of the gas sales, a reduction in staff needed, a reduction in tax income.. and so on. What you are suggesting will impact economic growth, something the flock is committed to. That will make you an outsider. You will find many reasons why this suggestion should not go further. For example “ no one will listen to me anyway”.

So any good ideas that could come up get squashed by your internal monitoring machine that is wired to keep you OK with the flock.
There ARE ways around this machine. Something for my next post……

Interesting post, which does explain much.

I for one would be interested in your follow up.

I'm not quite sure I believe this business about literally not seeing the ships: unless the New World at the time was inhabited solely by people whose eyesight was even worse than mine

I can understand, perhaps, thinking they were some kind of bird.

OK, anyone remember the theme-music and accompanying film for The Rockford Files (the one that began with an answerphone and a game of Patience)? Well, an argument raged for months about whether one of the quick-fire shots towards the end of the sequence had a naked woman in it. Blokes who wrote in saw her, women who wrote in didn't. It turned out she was there (but in a bikini, and next to a bloke in trunks) for 1/12 second.

OK, end of divertissement, back to PO. I am going back to my previous argument here and saying that HMG, and all who sail in her, regard this as a management problem, and not a physical one. Here's the difference:

RC thinks: OMG some of us are going to die(!) because of physical shortages. What do I/we need to do now that will minimise the pain in the future?
HMG thinks: this is probably going to happen, it might even happen On Our Watch. If it does, and people start to die, how will we manage the problem as it unfolds?

Note managing the problem, and minimising it, aren't necessarily the same thing.

I think most people simply don't want to, even if they are able to get their head around the concept of "less"...

We make judgements/decisions all day long. What clothes will I put on this morning? What will I have for breakfast? Is it safe to cross the street now? What will I say to the person when they answer the phone? What will the weather be like when I pop out for a sandwich? What will the weather be like tonight when I get home? What will I have for tea? What will I do after tea? Will I have another beer? ( ) What time will I go to bed?

We are in information overload - there is too much information coming at us from all directions. We have to think about too many things these days.

I think people who don't get Peak Oil, often simply discount/dismiss it from their judgements. This can be logically justified to onself quite easily, eg. what Max said - beyond their perception level, too far into the future to worry about, there are other more important things to worry/think about, 'they' will find a solution, not my problem, tough getting to the end of each day without thinking about things beyond one's control, etc.

The question then becomes, why do we get it so much?? hmmmm

RenewableCandy wrote:I'm not quite sure I believe this business about literally not seeing the ships: unless the New World at the time was inhabited solely by people whose eyesight was even worse than mine

I'm a bit suspicious about how anyone would know the perceptual experience of people on the beach, given that presumably the authors of the reports weren't there.

But I guess that the general point stands: it is harder to perceive things which don't fit into our standard frames....and the government wouldn't really let a thing like PO happen, would they?


Peter.

We all have short memories, and now PO (or resource depletion in general) seems self evident to me, but I know it didn't used to be. I was on the 'inside' of the group think that behind all the bickering politicians and sleazy businessmen the world was run on the advice of elite scientists and engineers who could see the future and plan the critical infrastructure decades in advance, so that humanity progressed to a glorious future in spite of all our petty squabblings.

I was brought up on endless TV repeats of oil company 'documentaries' of the wonderful progress of the oil industry to a super high tech low pollution future full of unsinkable double hulled tankers etc etc (20 years before all the single hulled tankers were scrapped).

I think we get our predominant world view in our first decade. I was taught to question the evidence like a scientist, and to look behind the bold claims, but it took another 20 years and the world wide web before I came across the evidence of the limits to growth.

When I first read LATOC I had cognitive dissonance. The world could not fall off the energy plateau that quickly. I still think LATOC is extreme, but it is a possible future given our leadership's refusal to address the issues.

I know very intelligent (far more intelligent than me) scientists who are extremely well read but dismiss resource depletion out of hand because it is so patently false as to be not worth investigating.

RalphW wrote:I know very intelligent (far more intelligent than me) scientists who are extremely well read but dismiss resource depletion out of hand because it is so patently false as to be not worth investigating.

How can any intelligent person actually believe that usable resources come from a bottomless pit? Maybe they think there are sub-terrestrial fairies producing never-ending supplies of everything we need

Surely, the Earth has a finite amount of chemical elements and compounds or have we got some extra-planetary source that I am unaware of? I suppose meteors do occasionally fall to Earth

As I see it Humans take all of the essential compounds out of the ecosystem in which they live to a disproportionate extent compared with all other life forms and alter those compounds into ones that aren't quite so useful. No other animal messes around with nature in this way.

In the case of fossil fuels - we took a substance that had taken milions of years to form and we burnt a large amount of it over 200 years. It'll take quite a while for that quantity of fossil fuels to reform according to scientific theory which is fairly widely accepted. Even if a person can't accept "peak oil" theory surely this is a fairly obvious concept.

I can't help thinking too that our ever-expanding number of living human bodies uses up quite a few of the essential elements, carbon atoms and water on the planet which aren't available for anything else

I can't imagine a world in which everything on the planet continues to exist in homeostasis while humans continue to mess everything up so spectacularly.

The more I look at what's happening in the world, the more I imagine us as micro-organisms on a Petri dish which have almost used up all of their substrate.

This perception thing is interesting.

A friend many years ago visited India.

She walked across a rat infested park with her rich hosts.

On returning to their house she asked why they didn't do something about the rats spoiling the nice park.

Her hosts INSISTED that there were NO rats in their park.

She was convinced that they BELIEVED this ... they didn't see the rats.

How can any intelligent person actually believe that usable resources come from a bottomless pit?

They dont, they dont believe anything, it just is.
Most people dont have the slightest idea how a fridge works, or electricity, of even a car, its just works, and thats all thats important.

I'm having honey roast pork sandwiches for my dinner (I'm actualy not I forgot them, bugger), I have no idea where the pork came from, or the salt, or the honey, or the onions and leeks.

I wanted them, they were there, thought process over.

There *is* a bottomless pit.

The wind and the sun.

The sun ALWAYS comes up every day.

The wind even if stopped will ALWAYS come back on.

The problem we have is the majority of people can't get their thick heads round anything other than "let's burn something".

You can't blame them really. "Let's burn something" is ingrained in our genetic makeup quite clearly from millions of years ago.

Harnessing the sun and the wind to keep warm and do other stuff is just too wierd. It's like that new fangled farming invention....

Vortex wrote:This perception thing is interesting.

A friend many years ago visited India.

She walked across a rat infested park with her rich hosts.

On returning to their house she asked why they didn't do something about the rats spoiling the nice park.

Her hosts INSISTED that there were NO rats in their park.

She was convinced that they BELIEVED this ... they didn't see the rats.

That's Asia. It's a "Face" thing. To admit there were rats in the park would be to Lose Face.

Crikey, what sun do you orbit on your side of the pond?

Assuming I survive this, my great great...great grandkids are going to have to sort out colonising Bernards Star and Alpha Centauri.

DominicJ wrote:Crikey, what sun do you orbit on your side of the pond?

Assuming I survive this, my great great...great grandkids are going to have to sort out colonising Bernards Star and Alpha Centauri.

What I'm trying to say Dom is that it's not a resource problem, it's an engineering problem.

I'm also saying that our perspective on the problem is derived from our ancestors propensity to use fire, so we automatically think of fire as the first solution.

We are a lot more advanced than that since we have invented windmills, solar panels, geothermal and hydroelectric.

We don't NEED to burn anything because we can BUILD energy sources.
But most people can't seem to get their head around it.

fifthcolumn wrote:

DominicJ wrote:Crikey, what sun do you orbit on your side of the pond?

Assuming I survive this, my great great...great grandkids are going to have to sort out colonising Bernards Star and Alpha Centauri.

What I'm trying to say Dom is that it's not a resource problem, it's an engineering problem.

I'm also saying that our perspective on the problem is derived from our ancestors propensity to use fire, so we automatically think of fire as the first solution.

We are a lot more advanced than that since we have invented windmills, solar panels, geothermal and hydroelectric.

We don't NEED to burn anything because we can BUILD energy sources.
But most people can't seem to get their head around it.

I don't think it's as simple as us being predisposed to think of energy use in terms of burning. The simple fact is that fossil fuels are incredibly energy-dense and there's nothing to compete with them, except uranium.

I'm sceptical that wind and solar power can sustain the current world population at even a fifth of the West's current standard of living. I'm not sure exactly what the implications of that would be; I mean clearly international travel is a luxury, as is mechanised agriculture; but I suspect there would be a lot of necessities that much of the world would have to do without.

I hope you're right, all the same.