Post Petroleum Stress Disorder

[Jcrowley]

I’ve come to identify it as what I call Post Petroleum Stress Disorder, which is something I’ve seen time and time again. It has a number of key symptoms which some of you might have experienced over the last couple of hours. The first one is slight clammy palms, a slight nausea, a sense of this sort of slightly not feeling very comfortable, mild palpitations and the possibility that actually things as you saw them when you came in here might not look quite the same when you go outside and look at them with your new way of looking.

There’s a sense of bewilderment and unreality when you realise, as I was overhearing some people in the tea room just now, talking about ‘Well actually, well that’s made of oil and that’s made of oil and this is made of ….’ and once that sinks in, it’s quite a shift. There’s an Irrational Grasping at Unfeasible Solutions, which is where you say ‘oh no we’ll be fine, we’ll just go to hydrogen, that will be fine, I feel a lot better now.’ Again, you see that lots of times, people just grasp at something instant, nuclear power, hydrogen.

Fear, it’s quite scary, and I’ve been involved in showing a film called The End of Suburbia which I’ll talk a bit more about later, but a couple of times I’ve had people I’ve had to really counsel down afterwards, you know this information can be quite upsetting for people. There’s also Outbreaks of Nihilism, feeling, ‘Well, what does it matter anyway’, or Survivalism, the sense of you just look after your own and head to the hills and sod everybody else, which is a strong trend in certain circles of this. There’s also Exuberant Optimism where people say ‘Fantastic! Peak oil! Fantastic! Solves climate change at a stroke!’ It’s not quite that straightforward.

Finally, there’s the danger of the ‘I Always Told You So Syndrome’ which is where you know, the Soil Association now might be saying ‘we always told you you should go organic’, and I might be saying ‘well I always told you you should build with straw bales and teach permaculture to people’, and you know, you see that in lots of different places.

http://transitionculture.org/2007/02/08/my-talk-to-the-soil-association-conference/

[Subdivisions]

1. I am so glad to see someone else watching this issue...

You are correct. The prospect of peak oil scares the HELL out of people.

[pscot]

3. If you can get their attention

The vast majority are simply not ready to take this on board.

[Subdivisions]

4. Can't say as I blame them. But if

we are indeed seeing the results of a peak in oil production, we're about to be plunged in to a new era of human existance. The Post Carbon Era (or a variant thereof).

Isn't it ironic that all these challenges are befalling us at the same time. Peak oil, Global Warming, extinctions, bees, and the list goes on. I believe that we have reached peak oil and caused global warming and that this planet can only support a maximum of 1 billion people. Some will say the figure is more like 4 billion. But in order to reduce the effects of global warming and to stave off peak oil by dramatically reducing the demand, there must be far fewer humans using up finite resources. And even if we stuck with the 4 billion humans figure, this planet would still have to lose 2.5 billion people.

Nature has a way of making "corrections".

[nam78_two]

2. Off to the greatest page with this.nt

[nam78_two]

5. ...

:kick:

[lostnotforgotten]

6. www.theoildrum.com - Need Anyone Say More?

eom