Who do you talk to?

[gylangirl]

Nicole and kaykay, I can relate to the commune idea.

My fantasy is to buy land, build a geo thermal and solar house/houses for my family, which at this point would only include my uberconsumer husband [however, he is weapons-trained], my child, my incredulous step son & his stylish but grossly uninformed fiancee, their potential offspring and possibly her mother and sisters. All this to get my husband to agree to move far away. [Then I think heck, make it a group project, why should I be the only investor? Ergo, commune.]

Then reality sets in. Except for my kid and me, they're all Republican party drones. Hubbie wants continued access to his expensive oil-dependent toys and his lattes and his shopping trips to the mall and Mc Donalds,and his propaganda "cable news",  not to mention use of frequent flyer miles. Step son, an urban architect, changes subject when I mention peak oil. He goes as far as praising Euro-designed cities and criticize wasteful American suburban design. But he's in it for the art.  Out-of-season food from the other side of the earth on the shelves of truck-supplied urban groceries? No problem there. Mention a pending urban  food crisis that might starve whatever kids he'll have? Conversation killer.

 Plus we can't sell the house right now.  I am stuck here. So then I think maybe instead I'll do something small to relocalize food supply where I am: Starting a community or school garden program that might spread. By now, I know better than to mention peak oil. It would kill any support for it. There's plenty of other good reasons to get a community garden going.
Perhaps later they'll realize what a good thing it was to have started that food garden education program a couple years back.

Yeah this fantasy is more do-able. Don't have to preach or change any minds, just do it.

[Nicole]

Gee, what a set of in-laws.  Have you considered divorce?

[gylangirl]

Yeah it's lonely out here in Bushie land.

[seraphima]

I've gotten used to stealth conversation with people- looking for openings and praising people for their strengths, little or big. Is someone a good garage-sale-r? There's a good opening on how prices for new are going up...Are they gardeners?...gee, did you know you can make a dynamite pesto out of nasturtium leaves? Wow, you bike to work? So sustainable and with the price of gas....

It is very rare that I find anyone who can really link up the possibilities of cascading cross-defaults; peak oil, peak gas, Just-in-time shipping, global warming, and let's throw in the potential for a global flu pandemic...

Having my husband who really get it, that is a superb blessing. It seems that I've been working on this kind of consciousness-raising (hey, that's an old term!) for a long, long time, but it also seems like more people are willing to look at possibilities, if I can find the right "hook".  Our local college is going to do a showing and discussion of The Power of Community, and another one on An Inconvenient Truth.  Maybe we can get The End of Suburbia on the roster, also...

[kceaton]

"Peak Oil" is not a concept you just read about and then walk away from untouched. And once you comprehend it in your heart as well as your mind, you'll never look at the people around you or the world in quite the same way.

Wow- if that isn't the honest truth.

[Jay Dee]

Stoneage you blow me away when you compare loneliness to a selection of physical sensations i.e. hunger, tiredness/sleep etc. Some people have feelings and are in touch with them and apparently some do not.
I have to agree this is a somewhat lonely endeavour,KayKay. Throwing out the baby with the bath water is not reality either - for most of us. ie. divorce etc. So we slog along. One of the ways I cope is continue moving in a direction I feel we will need to go without getting overbearing about it. However, I must confess I was told not to show up to a family function just this past Sunday if I was going to bring up peak oil or global warming. I don't even paint doom just mention facts - such as - "did you happen see that article regarding a chunk of ice the size of Texas has melted off of the artic in the last twenty-four months?" Pardon the pun but it is not warmly received.
 It is not quality(read bullshit) converastion material for the head in the sand crowd and I can only assume because it scares the piss out of people and they really do not know what to do with it but ignore it - then it does not hurt them - or so goes the theory. My favorite is to warm them up with some of the shortgaes of raw materials due to different factors - china, india etc and then begin mentioning what great investment opportunities are available for the person who can predict how far it may go and in what areas. What about crude - been watching that? Unfortunately, informed investors are probably about as difficult to find as informed peak oilers though. I'm not exactly Eddie Lampert myself. My wife is a pretty good sport - just today she agreed we probably ought to round out our meager investment funds with a few gold pieces and some silver. I could see the recognition but we did not need to go into any depth other than it is long held to be a prudent approach to always have a little precious metal...I have the land and a few goodies. I have a selection of "yard tools" and "home repair equipment" that makes my rather large garage look like a frigging backroom in a hardware store. My wife worries a heck of a lot more about rattlesnakes out on our land than zombies coming over the ridge so first things first. Therefore, I am working on getting the land cleaned up with that new tractor I bought a few years back and minimize the rattle snake population and while I'm at it  - clearing out a  little place for some "special plants" a few fruit trees and perhaps we may even think about a few vegetables in time - for health reasons, eh. Why not put a fence - we may want a animal or two in time if we decide to move out there some day - you just never know. But still a lonely slog .. I know what you mean. Still moving along.... probably a little slower than I wish but I BS myself by hanging on to information that helps me think we have some more time - how much - who knows....
So who do I talk to - I talk to you and swap threads here and there and to all of the others around here and there who have some awareness and have accepted the reality of the need to keep their eyes wide open and then some....regarding what we believe.

[kaykay]

Jay Pea, you said it all in a nut shell.....I'm glad to have you to talk to too.....I'd think I was going nuts if no one listened at all.
I get the same thing from my family...."do we have to talk about that stuff all the time?"  YES! 

[Chip Haynes]

Of course, on the other hand, if you're faced with some annoying bozo you'd really rather not have to deal with, nothing, but nothing, drives them away faster than a good old fashioned peak oil rant!

Unless you happen to carry a bottle of Simple Green everywhere you go.

[GreenNeck]

Basically, I talk to you, on this board.
I've given up talking to friends/relatives about PO and other similar issues. They don't want to hear it. For some of them, I think they know I'm probably right - it scares the hell out of them and they tune it out. I do think a lot of folks have a sense this world is going astray, if only unconsciouly, and this is too big for them to handle.

[Chip Haynes]

Well, it doesn't help that we're about the only place they hear it. It's not like it's general knowledge or a common topic just yet. Anyone that starts going on about peak oil is often seen as about half a step from standing out on the sidewalk wearing an Army blanket poncho and holding a sign that says, "THE END IS NEAR!"

Even if it is.

[seraphima]

I have found some interesting stories and reflections about these kinds of topics over at: http://www.peakoilblues.com/

Hope this is useful!

[Jay Dee]

I guess it depends on what you subscribe too as to whether or not PO is a fact or not. I think many here and in the petroleum industry believe it is a fact. The unknowns are iwhen it will happen or how fast it will happen. Nobody seems to dispute that it is real and will happen.A number of people believe we may be on the front end of PO at the moment. The most optimistic estimates I have seen indicate we may have as much as forty more years. The moment may be somewhere in between. If we are already on the front end we may not know it for several years afterwards and are able to look back and say "this is where it started" - similar to how a recessions beginning is determined. - we won't know we are in it until we are deep in it. The classic signs that are being projected to look for certainly appear to me to be showing signs of their presence currently but I am hardly an expert. I will say I would not be surprized to determine five years  from now that we see that it really began during the current time(today).

[JurisDoctorOfDoom]

A few weeks ago I tried to talk to someone  - who I thought would be a good person to talk to - about PO, a "political activist" guy who is a grad school student at Evergreen, in Olympia. He started lecturing me - about Tesla. I had just finished reading "The Party's Over" - and Richard Heinberg's postscript to the second edition, where he talks about "the cult of Tesla." I really loved reading that; I loved how Heinberg addresses the desire to have "free energy" and explains so clearly and precisely why this is such a wrong headed thing to do. He uses the example of a person who wins the lottery, blows most of his money, and then finds himself with debts he can't pay, but rather than going out and getting a job, he instead spends his last remaining money buying more lottery tickets. I recommended to the Tesla guy I was talking to that he read this book - but I don't think he will. And I can't force him to do so. It would be wrong for me to try.

2) PO is a theory. It is not FACT. It is not Dharma. We should try to not forget that.

Not to take anything away from Richard, but I gave him that idea while in a cafe here in Santa Rosa! I called it the "techno savior complex." I believe it was in the context of talking about how you always and I mean ALWAYS have one guy (it's always a guy) who shows up to PO meeting who is working on, knows of, or somehow involved in some type of free energy technology that is 6 months (always 6 months) away from hitting the market and eliminating the need for oil.

My theory was/is these guys suffer from "techno-savior complex". The sympotms include 1) worshipping Tesla, 2) wanting to save the world and 3) having a technology that is going to replace oil if only the evil capitalists and oil companies would stop scewing them over!  It's the same act, I've seen at every meeting I've gone to. I'm pretty sure the lottery example was mine too.  He took notes and all. The article and lucid way in which he explained the concepts, of course, were entirely his own. And to be clear, I'm sure I've written stuff I got from him but had forgotten about. (and he let's me reprint his articles for free on LATOC so I ain't bitching one bit.)

[Jay Dee]

Having a few  geek genes n me I certainly considered tech salvation but I realize it is mostly a stop gap measure of a temporary nature.   We may be able to have some technology based manufacturing. I would not want to ignore the possibilities. But when you starrt getting into heavy duty mining of raw materials, manufacturing and production of equipment and materials using those raw materials  and transportation of the products then you start seeing where the processes come apart and our options become quite limited. The broader across industries you reach you start seeing the achilles in all of them at some point in the processa nd it starts emerging to one that the processes we have in palce  currently are simply not possible on a large scale indefinitel with what we currently know. Now how long it will take to get to those limits and what we might do to preserve and prolong and thus minimize the quickness of powering down is dependent on a lot of variables that are currently unknown or so it appears to me and would take some serious model building  to project even remotely feasible theories.  The problem is we as nations of citizens must eat and tend our gardens while this is going on or we will perish. Time becomes a  much more pressing issue when you start seeing how fragile systems really are and how quickly they become unrelaible and how we start needing to eat even after a good meal... It toook us ffteen years to get  a man on the moon - and that is a drop in the ocean of what we will need to accomplish under less than fifty years which are the outside limits of what I have seen as to predicition  of long term availabuility of oil and most think that time predicition unrealistic. We can't even get people to stop wasting energy much less find, develop, and install real alternatives to ourenergy supplies thus far.

[Chip Haynes]

   Ok, so what's the opposite of the "techno-savior complex"? I certainly don't expect technology (that helped get us into this mess) to save us. Quite the opposite. Technology will allow us (does allow us) to extract more oil faster than ever before from dwindling oil wells. Technology allows us to turn Hubbert's Curve into Hubbert's Cliff. Technology will not hand us a magic wand to create energy where none exists. So what's the new alternative energy of the future?

Probably sweat.