The RGR rebuttal to PowerSwitch users thread.

[JavaScriptDonkey]

The alternative is to have a site full of posts that all agree with each other in a perpetually and nauseatingly self-congratulatory fashion.

Can you imagine how insipid and eventually destructive that would be?

You are so right

Well you said it first

That's very kind you you to say so

I'm just adhering to rule 4 - always thank the previous poster in a non-confrontational way.

Ah yes, rule 4; my favourite

Well you did suggest it at the forum sustainability meeting

Thanks for reminding me. I think it's so important that we are all inclusive in a non-denominational, non-judgemental way with no reference to any 'isms'.

Apart from dissenters of course

How do you mean?

Well, we just ban anyone who disagrees with us and delete their posts. Not really very 'non-judgemental' is it.

I'm sorry, you seem to have left the path of reason. I think you need a few months to re-assess your commitment to this community.

Don't I get a say in what I think is good for this community?

No.

[/sarcasm]

BTW, speaking as a newbie I find the rebuttals to RGR very revealing.

[postie]

The alternative is to have a site full of posts that all agree with each other in a perpetually and nauseatingly self-congratulatory fashion.


BTW, speaking as a newbie I find the rebuttals to RGR very revealing.

I started this thread, as RGR was continually denouncing everyone as a doomer or Peak Oil delusionist... his comments aren't constructive and are designed, in my opinion, to piss people off.

It's not about agreeing with each other, far from it, the debate moves on, if there is constructive and critical comment.. based on more than " I'm RGR and you lot are a bunch of morons who don't know anything.. because I'm RGR and I obviously know it all ... but I can't say or else I'll have people knocking at my door, by the way, you lot will still be prepping for PO while my kids are eating crude oil on the moon"..

That isn't helpful. All it does is wind people when they're criticised.. because... someone thinks they know better.. without explaining why they know better!!!

As this thread has proven... he can't put up one single shred of evidence as to why people on here are wrong. Or why PO isn't going to happen.

I aint falling for his latest troll-trick of saying PO has happened all we need to do is pick a year when it happened, he's still belittling the concept, the theory of PO.. without backing it up.. that RGR is now accepting PO? Bullshit. He's taking the piss out of everyone. In the same way you encounter a mad man and say " yeah, sure you're Napoleon Bonaparte and you work for Darth Vader, I believe you..yeah.. I do!"

He's a troll.. better people than me though have called him out on his bullshit.

[RGR]

[quote="snow hope"]

[JavaScriptDonkey]

As this thread has proven... he can't put up one single shred of evidence as to why people on here are wrong. Or why PO isn't going to happen.

I think his position is painfully clear.

Peak oil, in the sense that the rate of flow of oil will eventually ebb is a position of rationality on a finite planet.

However, what RGR does not accept is that the pumps will run dry any time soon or that the necessarily slow decline in the RoF will have disastrous consequences. He points to the operation of demand restriction through price in the free market and how economies of scale will allow alternative technologies to become more prevalent as oil becomes less cheap.

A contrary viewpoint often encountered in the POsphere is that the flow of oil will cease sometime next Tuesday causing TEOTWAWKI. All economic activity will end and those not blessed with the foresight to plant a few cabbages will starve. Vast swathes of suburbia will become infested with criminal gangs/zombies/starving puppies all on the look out for the tell-tale wisp of smoke from a cast iron stove.

RGR does not equate PO with mass societal breakdown in the same way that I do not equate climate change with armageddon.

Oil will surely wane but does that actually mean the end of times or is it just another period of transition?

My only vested interest in either doctrine (for that is what they have become) is that I also live on this planet as do my children. My own view of PO is pragmatic in that there really is very little that I can do about it.

It is also very easy to simply ignore a troll.

[UndercoverElephant]

As this thread has proven... he can't put up one single shred of evidence as to why people on here are wrong. Or why PO isn't going to happen.

I think his position is painfully clear.

Peak oil, in the sense that the rate of flow of oil will eventually ebb is a position of rationality on a finite planet.

However, what RGR does not accept is that the pumps will run dry any time soon or that the necessarily slow decline in the RoF will have disastrous consequences. He points to the operation of demand restriction through price in the free market and how economies of scale will allow alternative technologies to become more prevalent as oil becomes less cheap.

A contrary viewpoint often encountered in the POsphere is that the flow of oil will cease sometime next Tuesday causing TEOTWAWKI. All economic activity will cease and those not blessed with the foresight to plant a few cabbages will starve. Vast swathes of suburbia will become infested with criminal gangs/zombies/starving puppies all on the look out for the tell-tale wisp of smoke from a cast iron stove.

RGR does not equate PO with mass societal breakdown in the same way that I do not equate climate change with armageddon.

Oil will surely wane but does that actually mean the end of times or is it just another period of transition?

My only vested interest in either doctrine (for that is what they have become) is that I also live on this planet as do my children. My own view of PO is pragmatic in that there really is very little that I can do about it.

It is also very easy to simply ignore a troll.

JSD,

This is not "just another period of transition." It is unique not only in terms of industrialised civilisation, or all of human civilisation, or even of our species; It is unique in the history of Life on Earth.

What is about to happen can only ever happen once on any one planet where life with "advanced intelligence"* evolves.

*a species that evolved with cognitive power as the primary "all eggs in one basket" evolutionary strategy.

UE.

[RGR]

[quote="JavaScriptDonkey"]

[RGR]

[quote="UndercoverElephant"]

[UndercoverElephant]

This is not "just another period of transition." It is unique not only in terms of industrialised civilisation, or all of human civilisation, or even of our species; It is unique in the history of Life on Earth.

It is NOT unique. It has happened before. People have gotten hysterical over it before...like even BEFORE POSTERS HERE WERE BORN. Governments have fought wars, in OTHER centuries over oil, people have declared peak before the Great Depression, global production rates have decreased XX%....before, people have proclaimed running out before, Presidents have lamented the end of the oil age, before, cheap oil disappeared before many people on this forum were born (1969), "easy" oil disappeared in 1901...and again in the 1940's, and again the 1960's, and again in the 2000's (by my count, we are now on the 5th round of easy oil disappearing), people have declared needing a new Saudia Arabia every 3 years...in the 70's! and guess what? We found MORE than that. None of the peak oil claims in the modern era are new.

No it hasn't. I am not just talking about "peak oil" here. Peak oil is something like the cherry on the top of the cake...or maybe the cutting edge of the knife. It is part of a much bigger picture involving explosive growth in human population, consumption of resources and production of pollution. This process was probably inevitable once the original agricultural revolution happened and definately inevitable once the industrial revolution happened. But if you take an even broader look at the situation then you will probably conclude that this situation became inevitable long before that - millions of years before.

Homo sapiens is fundamentally different to all the other species of animal which have ever existed on this planet. When the hominid line branched away from that of the other great apes evolution put all of its eggs in one basket. Hominid evolution ended up being driven entirely by increases in cognitive power and associated physiological changes (fully-opposable thumbs, the capacity for speech, etc...) The result was a species which created an entirely new evolutionary niche for itself, right at the very top of the food chain. Creatures had previously existed which use tools (birds, monkeys) and which make large-scale alterations to their local environments (beavers, elephants) but no creature before humans had ever made this their one-and-only survival strategy.

So there you have it...what is about to happen is unique not because humans have never faced resource crunches and population crashes before, but because the process of evolution has created a species which interacts with the rest of the ecosystem in a way that no other creature ever has done in the past, and because we have now reach a critical tipping point where our unbridled success at dominating that ecosystem has become our greatest liability instead of our greatest strength. We have overcome every natural obstacle to our uber-domination of Planet Earth but we are now faced with an obstacle unlike any other in nature: ourselves. We have become the problem that needs to be overcome, and we are neither psychologically, politically, economically nor culturally able to cope with such a situation. Biological and cultural evolution has "programmed" us to attempt to dominate the rest of the ecosystem but the only way out of our current predicament is to defend that ecosystem at the expense of human beings. We now face a choice between stopping doing the only thing we know how to do or letting nature run its course and stop us from doing it the nasty way. And there's no prizes for guessing which of these two paths we will take.

[RGR]

[quote="UndercoverElephant"]

[UndercoverElephant]

I will speculate (which I don't like to do) that shortly after one man invented fire, another one claimed it would cause the downfall of mankind, burning down the forests, killing the animals in the forests, depriving mankind of the berries and roots they needed for survival, in other words the ancient equivalent of OH NOES!! THE END IS NIGH!!

Your statement has any more validity than those prior claims...how?

Where do you want me to start, RGR? My statement has more validity because I have the benefit of modern science to produce information and the internet and modern media to distribute it. I have been following the whole ecological debate very closely for the last thirty years and it is now blatantly obvious that we are heading for multiple inter-related crises including: depletion of fresh water supplies, climate change, peak all-sorts-of-nonrenewable resources, deforestation, soil erosion, unsustainable pressure on fisheries and widespread bacterial resistance to antibiotics. And that's just the physical problems. I haven't even started on the political problems that stand in the way of any possible solution.

I'm really only interested in the bigger picture - what this looks like on a global scale and in the context of human history - and that picture is very grim indeed. The writing has been on the wall for at least the last two decades, but we are now rapidly heading towards the point where very real consequences are being felt by large numbers of people all over the world. Reality is dawning, and the process is getting faster all the time.

By changing the argument, as you have, to one of a much higher level, certain things happen. One of them is that it is now necessary to recognize that no single commodity is responsible for the rise of mankind, but our ability to change the form and nature of things, because of some of the reasons you have already mentioned. EXACTLY correct (IMHO), and EXACTLY why peak oil doesn't mean bubbcuss. Not enough liquid fuels? We will make them. Have been, are, and will in the future.

No, RGR. It was our technological ingenuity which got us into this mess in the first place. It can't get us out of it, although I strongly suspect that we will eventually resort to global geo-engineering technofixes to try to stop climate change.

[UndercoverElephant]

RGR

The relationship between humans and the rest of the Earth's ecosystem is very similar to that between a parasite and a host animal, but with one crucial difference. Parasites, at least the type which can only survive on a living host (which is nearly all of them) have evolved in a way that ensures they do not kill their hosts. But the Earth's ecosystem has never experienced a parasitic species like humans before, and its systems for providing resistance have so far not been able to react fast enough to keep our numbers under control. We have now reached the point where we are killing our host - the rest of the ecosystem is in dire trouble and it is getting worse all of the time. We may yet kill our host completely - the possibility of humans creating irreversible runaway climate change remains real. It is more likely, though, that we will render most of the Earth uninhabitable for humans before we reach the global warming "point of no return." Either way, industrialised human civilisation as we know it is doomed.

UE

[Mean Mr Mustard]

doesn't mean bubbcuss in the greater scheme of things

You made that word up...

[postie]

...how?

This thread isn't for you to ask questions, you troll, it's for you to answer them.

Get that into your head. This thread isn't for ...you... to.. ask... questions.


(and nice to see you reverting to type, btw, saying we'll simply "make" more oil.. you couldn't keep up the pretence, could you? )

[UndercoverElephant]

...how?

This thread isn't for you to ask questions, you troll, it's for you to answer them.

Get that into your head. This thread isn't for ...you... to.. ask... questions.

Asking questions is a good way of proceeding if he's actually interested in the answers.

[JavaScriptDonkey]

RGR

The relationship between humans and the rest of the Earth's ecosystem is very similar to that between a parasite and a host animal, but with one crucial difference. Parasites, at least the type which can only survive on a living host (which is nearly all of them) have evolved in a way that ensures they do not kill their hosts. But the Earth's ecosystem has never experienced a parasitic species like humans before, and its systems for providing resistance have so far not been able to react fast enough to keep our numbers under control. We have now reached the point where we are killing our host - the rest of the ecosystem is in dire trouble and it is getting worse all of the time. We may yet kill our host completely - the possibility of humans creating irreversible runaway climate change remains real. It is more likely, though, that we will render most of the Earth uninhabitable for humans before we reach the global warming "point of no return." Either way, industrialised human civilisation as we know it is doomed.

UE

I think you are looking at evolution the wrong way. It is not that nature, in her loving care, promoted natural balance by ensuring the parasites evolved to not kill their hosts. What actually happens is that parasitic species that mutate to kill their hosts before they themselves reproduce simply die and become extinct. The ones that are good at being parasites get to pass on their genes. Evolution is all about death not natural balance. There are very good reasons why Pandas are an endangered species and they are all to do with what goes to make a Panda.

The chance of humans producing irreversible climate change to the point of rendering the planet uninhabitable remains vanishingly small despite all the hyperbole from charitable organisations dependant on the cash flow that such fears generate. We will have to wait for the next Ice Age for that to (nearly) happen again. Homo sapiens have been around for a long time and survived in far worse conditions than these with a lot less technology. Your direct ancestors managed it quite well and YOU are their key to continued immortality. Would they be proud?

Over shoot and die off do relate to us but they are mitigated by our technology. Our unique feature (actually not that unique) is that we can manipulate our surroundings to make it fit us rather than having to wait for conditions to change or evolution to catch up.

I don't think that the future is all peaches&cream but I think it might be better than what we had, say, 1000 years ago when we were without antiseptics, electricity, mass communications, disease resistant wheat, proper mass sewage systems, etc.

The Earth's ecosystem has been massively shaped by life processes since the introduction of oxygen by Stromatolites. I say again that ours is not a static ecosystem; change is normal and we are the species most adapted to survive it.