198. PEAK CREDIBILITY
It's a few days after Christmas, and the peak oilers are already starting to cannibalize each other. You see, the whole peak oil Internet phenomenon runs on red meat, and if there's a lull in the bad news, the believers start to lose interest. It's gotten so bad that there was a guy on peakoil.com yesterday trying to sell his peak oil hideout!
So what we are facing in the short-term is not a shortage of oil -- but rather a shortage of red meat to feed the doomers. This is a grave crisis for the peak oil cottage industry. Rather than resource wars between nations, we are going to see wars between the top peak oil spokesmen, as they ruthlessly stab each other in the back to salvage a share of the ever-dwindling supply of peak oil credibility.
Kunstler is already firing salvos at Ruppert:
I regard the 9/11 conspiracy theories as a fantasy and a distraction from the real problems we face. It is especially unfortunate that they became associated with the Peak Oil issue, and that was obviously a result of Mike Ruppert's elaboration of them in his book Across the Rubicon, which brought discredit to his otherwise good reporting on the global oil situation, and tainted others like myself who regard energy as the crucial geopolitical and economic issue of our time. There is enough confusion in this nation without conflating the real concerns over energy with paranoid fantasies about government plots.Source
-- JD
posted by JD @ 6:53 AM
15 comments
15 Comments:
So Peak "Peak Oil"?
Peak Gossip. Peak Debunk.
Dobrii Den, Drug moi!
Good stuff there, though I'm on the peak oil side of the spectrum myself.
As regards 7/11 Ruppert is such a suitable case for treatment that he is enough to turn any impartial 'concerned citizen' into a peak oil debunker.
In fact. my suspicion is that he has been created by the US Zionist Occupied Government so as to discredit those who come into contact with him.
Ruppert himself is PART OF THE CONSPIRACY!
Remember those two gunman behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll?
It all LINKS UP!!!
I’ve often wondered when the point comes when we know for sure that either:
1. The Doomers were right and the world is heading for the cheese grater.
2. Life carries on as normal.
PO Dommerism follows much the same mathematical structure as the supply bell curve. Shock horror PO pessimism can be traced as far back as the 1930s and reached a mini-peak in the 1970s, before OPEC threw a spanner into the works. Now the scary part: It could be entirely possible the Monte ‘Lets cull the human herd’ (chief PO affectionado, font of all human knowledge) Myres and his clan could be muttering peakspeak for the next 35 years, he’s been at it now since at least 1970 after he purchased ‘The limits of growth’, probably a mix-up with some other subject.
might one speculate that a large portion of demand is driven by supply??
We Yanks get blasted 24-7 to buy more, bigger, better, etc??
So emotion drives demand?
I mean really is it neccessary for a toyota to say toyota inside the car for example, i've already bought it!!
A shift in perspective on our lives and world would do us as much "good" as finding 10 Ghawar fields a year.
Frankily not only is our culture pollutive, and consumptive but all things aside it is also obsolete and due for some kind of philisophical ascension from this level we have been stuck at for 1000 years oil or no oil.
A shift in perspective on our lives and world would do us as much "good" as finding 10 Ghawar fields a year.
what liberal claptrap. As if good intentions will solve thermodynamics. All reasonable conservation technologies were developed and implemented in the 1980's. The law of diminishing returns tells us that further conservation efforts will fail--they will absorb more energy then they save. You can not apply Moore's Law to spawl.
As if thermodynamics says anything meaningful about human civilization.
As if there's no choice between using the amount of oil we do now and dying out.
liberal???!
Do you really think a single 120 pound woman need haul a hulking 10,000 pound
v-8 driven GMC 50 miles one way to work alone everyday?
what would that amount of fuel equal to in farming productivity??
"The law of diminishing returns tells us that further conservation efforts will fail--they will absorb more energy then they save. You can not apply Moore's Law to spawl."
so, all meaningful science stopped in the 80's??? you must not be very old then.........
diminishing returns?????
it tells us what? your statement is so vague and undefined and yet you want to hang the fate of humanity on
something so non-specific....
moore's law...sprawl....
so do little middle of nowhere towns that have been around for 150 years constitute sprawl, do you ever go outside even??
GO BE DOOMED...see what it accomplishes, and when you're done being an angsty apocophile i'm sure there is something productive you can contribute......
"what liberal claptrap. As if good intentions will solve thermodynamics. All reasonable conservation technologies were developed and implemented in the 1980's. The law of diminishing returns tells us that further conservation efforts will fail--they will absorb more energy then they save. You can not apply Moore's Law to spawl. "
Wow, just wow, are the doomers getting stupider or what?
Thermodynamics has absolutely nothing to do with anything regarding peak oil - if you want to get into a bitch fit about efficiencies I suggest you look up the efficiency of oil -> gasoline (here's a hint, it's negative, because it's against the second law of thermodynamics for ANY energy conversion to be positive). Has this stopped us from making gasoline? Obviously not! We take oil (plentiful and unusable for most everything in it's base form) and convert it to gas.
We figure out some other energy conversions, and I dunno... CONSERVE a bit (I believe we could feasibly, in first world countries anyway, cut our oil consumption by 60% - unless you are in the "I need a car" club) and we've pushed any serious problems out so far into the future it would best be left to our children and grandchildren to figure out solutions to.
Problem 1: Our immediate concern with oil decline.
Problem 2: Our concern with whatever oil's replacements (yes, it'll be multiple things kiddos) will do when they start to run out
Problem 3: Moving onto a non growth based system, stabalizing the earth's human population and economies to be non debt based.
We don't need to worry about 2 and 3 at the moment. Seriously, whoever will inherit those problems will probably have a better idea of how to solve them.
The lines are really starting to get blurry here as to whether "peak oil" is a geological issue or psychological issue......
200 mpg, is it possible?
seems like there is some form or mobility between barefeet and cadillac
escalades right?
I once knew a guy that put a weed-eater motor on a huffy 20" bicycle, it would do 30 mph and got about 65 miles on it's half gallon tank.......what if it were a ceramic sleeved turbo-biodiesel hybrid huffy bicycle?
i think that Kunstler is trying to distance himself from Rupper because the latter is a fucking nutjob.
peak oil is coming on strong in the mainstream. you can bet there will be a lot of castle building to take advantage of this mainstream interest. Kunstler wants to come out sounding like a reasonable peak oiler.
the moment any movement grows large enough, lines become to form, sub-groups splinter off.
before PO went maintstream the PO community was mostly tolerant of each other because they didn't have the numbers.
so i don't think that just because the lines in the PO community are being defined it's because PO is becoming some sort of non-issue.
still it's good to see Rupert getting the beatdown. he's a freak and i'm sick of seeing him getting quoted by various tin-hat wearing conspiracy monger doomers and reasonable people alike. leave him and FTW to the tin-hats.
but, then with peak oil there is no defined moment of action, no glorious moment of battle to prepare for an enemy with no face, and no way to make a definite plan, so how do we prepare ourselves for that.......maybe, and this is a big maybe it's (alternatives to oil) like the early 90's and computers, many different standards no
real front runners and a million different innovations a day, maybe the problem with alternative energy is that as soon as a course of action can be decided on and investment or legislation made to support and the map changes and it's back to square one.......maybe
Hey poopmokey. shut up.
"when it's clear that most oil is used in cars, most cars are too big and most driving is not necessary"
Well, said, and I would like to further add this:
about starvation and food supply, If you live in florida, eat oranges, in hawaii enjoy pineapples, in georgia you might enjoy some peanut butter, washington apples for washington....and so on....no need to transport lettuce to New york from California when lettuce really has a negligible nutritional value, and Americans eat too much anyway....and before running out the idea of preserving what we have now, I think we could save a good lot of it......see....pebble bed modular reactors.
oil is really still to cheap to "kick the switch" and make alternatie viable, but it's a matter of time, and for every alternative that comes online it will offset the demand and stabilize the whole thing.....so I have to agree the bigger problems are misuse of technology, and misguided fundementalists are a real threat....
JD,
Kunstler has always denounced the conspiracy theories around peak oil / 9-11 etc. For years already, so I don't think its completely fair to attack him on this.
His pushing around of Ruppert is not new, he's the one keeping the balance (well, at least a bit on this part ;-)
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