I'm a peak oil moderate, and my challenge to the doomers is to spell out a realistic energy timeline that leads to "collapse."  I don't  think there is one.  Even if oil peaks, it then tails, and the tail provides time for adjustment.  It may be that such adjustment is hurried and less proactive than we'd like, but there is a big difference between late mobilization and collapse.

We've mobilized before, when pressed into it.

This really boils down to a pessimism that 2000 era Americans are less "future proof" and less willing to change than the disco dancers of the 70's.

It's nice to hear some thoughts from other "peak oil moderates." I believe peak oil is a real and very pressing concern, but if you spend a little time on some of the listservs, once you get past the data dump on where we're at now, it's pure hyperbole.

My impression is that peak oil catastrophists measure and respond to the problem from a highly American perspective. The rhetoric at it's heart generally assumes 2 things.

People are going to degenerate to murdering barbarians as soon as gas prices hit $10 a gallon.
The only way to deal with this is to preserve whatever semblance of middle class American lifestyle you can while the rest of the world goes up in flames.

As to the first point, I take a more optimistic view of humanity and think most people are basically civil. During our great depression people stood in bread lines, they didn't roam the countryside raping and pillaging. As to the second point most people on the planet are not nearly as dependent on oil as Americans are, many are for all practical purposes disconnected from the global petro economy and so they will continue on with their lives despite our problems.

While peak oil is likely to cause severe adjustment problems, there's just too many shades of grey between where we are now and total catastrophe to throw in the towel just yet.

Two reasons why Toby Hemenway is wrong and there will be no soft-landing.

Those who have studied the Great Depression and its causes know it was triggered by a stock market crash. And that crash also had a trigger. In those days it was possible to by stocks on only 10% margin. (The current lower limit is 50% but the SEC often sets it at a higher level.) The market was growing by leaps and bounds and many were getting rich by investing all their funds in the market at 10% margin. This means that every time the market rose by 10% they doubled their money. They would then double up again and quadruple their original investment on the next 10% rise.

But then as it was bound to do, the market started to fall, but only slightly at first.  But when the market had fell only by about 5%, this triggered thousands of margin calls. When many did not come up with more margin money, their account was closed out, which caused a steep drop in the market, which triggered more margin calls, which in turn caused.....  Well, you get the idea.

The market caused the loss of fortunes. Few people had any money to invest in anything. This caused a drying up of capital. This triggered massive layoffs in all capital-intensive industries such as the construction industry. This in turn caused a drop in consumption of all goods and services. This in turn caused more layoffs. This in turn caused.....  Well, I hope you get that idea also.

But because very little stock is purchased on margin these days, and even when it is, the margin requirement I very high, we could never have a crash caused by the same reasons as the 1929 crash. But consider this scenario: Say we are about one to two years beyond the peak. There is no longer any doubt, the world has come to realize that peak oil is here and oil production will drop a little each year.....forever. This will mean that many industries such as aircraft and automobile will suffer a huge drop in sales. This will mean that their stock will crash.

But it does not stop here. Every industry is, in one way or another, dependent on energy for growth. If their energy supply starts to shrink, it means that instead of the expected growth year after year, they can expect to shrink a little every year. Now since people invest in the market for capital growth, not capital shrinkage, people will start to pull their money out of the equities market. Which will trigger more market losses and cause more people to dump stock which will in turn trigger..... Well is it not obvious? I mean the realization of an ever shrinking energy supply will, sooner or later, trigger the mother of all stock market crashes and all the massive layoffs and hardships that go with it. This stock market crash will make the market crash of 1929 look like a Sunday Picnic, and likewise the depth of the depression that it triggers.

The second point I would like to point out concerns something that M. King Hubbard often stated. He said: "Were we a rational society, a virtue of which we have rarely been accused, we would husband our oil and gas resources." During the seventies US oil producers tried to keep out cheap imported oil which allowed them to sell more domestic oil. Hubbard sarcastically called this "The drain America first polity."  

So what happens when countries like Mexico, Russia and many other oil producing nations become totally rational and decide to husband their oil? Would these countries decide not to drain their country first and save it for themselves? Would not Russia realize the very strong position they would be in if they had enough oil to last for many decades while most of the rest of the world suffered?  

Of course Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and a few other heavy producers would not be in such a position because they are almost totally dependent on petrodollars to feed their ever-growing populations. These countries have virtually no internal industries and if oil funds dried up they would be flooded with starving, and perhaps rioting hoards. But for many other countries the problem would not be nearly so severe. They would realize that if they are to survive in a collapsing world, they must husband their oil.

And this drying up of perhaps half the oil on the export market would cause a sudden cliff in the availability of oil for countries like the US, Japan, China and all countries that import more than half their petroleum.

In the best of all possible worlds, we could have a very slow decline in energy supplies combined with a very slow decline in population with little if energy world conflict. Surely everyone realizes by now that we do not live in such a world. I am predicting that the decline is likely to be far more violent and traumatic than most people, even Peak Oilers, believe.

Ron Patterson
Pensacola, Fl.

I loved Ken Deffey's book, BEYOND PEAK OIL.  
He tells it like it is.  He's not running scared, he points out the Rocky Mt front has lots of in-ground oil.  
The biggest users of oil, after the container ships that use this s-o-o-o-o-o cheap oil in their diesels so we can buy gee-gaws and fooraws for pennies, is the diesel haulers that transport those containers from one coast to the other.  And you thought your cars were the reason we went to war, wrong.  Military travels not on its stomach these days but gas.  So, we don't even come in third, the public is out of the running entirely.  
If we go to global war, it won't be for the public's cars. First is trans-oceanis shipping, then cross country shipping, and then military.  

I don't really see how the market is independent; I believe market volatility and stability are created applications by big money manipulations.  Remember the huge loss of 50% in the 90's; were Wall Street Investers hurt in this?  The investing public was gutted, not the wealthy.  
The Peak Oil conference should produce some genuine information; hope to hear more.  

I really liked Deffeyes' book myself.  If you feel like tipping to join the pessimists, Tertzakian's "A Thousand Barrels A Second" is a good antidote.

Deffeyes has the geology down, and the mechanisms of well production down.  What Tertzakian adds is the systems of global supply and production.  It's basically how the wells (Deffeyes) join together to create billion barrel distribution networks (Tertzakian).

When you step back to the big picture you see trends that take decade to unfold.  That's both good and bad.  It will take decades to reform the oil-based portions of our economy ... but we have decades.

Expect (in my humble opinion) 20-30 years of change, with some companies and countries suffering (see "Nigeria" and "GM"), and some profiting.

In general we're not talking about either-or situations.  

1. Our demand for oil is unchangeable and is not significantly affected by price.

Our demand for oil is changeable and can be affected by price if the price goes high enough.  The price went high enough in the early 80s.  Demand will certainly change in the event that there is simply not enough supply to go around.  So he is right; statement number one is false.  But the premise that it has to be true before we will see serious and severe social and economic problems does not follow.

Our demand for oil is changeable, but it does not change overnight.  There is a lag.  People are reluctant to change long-standing ways, and institutions, building codes, and economic incentives interfere with peoples' ability to adjust to impending shortages before they have arrived.  

Our demand for oil is changeable, but it is not likely that it will change in time for a soft landing.  Indeed, given the amount of energy and the lead time required to develop the technology and infrastructure to exploit a new energy source or sources, the time has already passed.

2. We are so badly addicted to oil that we will watch our civilization collapse rather than change our behavior.

We are so badly addicted to a particular way of life that we are used to that we will not recognize that our civilization is collapsing before we ourselves are living in FEMA tent cities.

3. Significant oil conservation is not possible in the time frame needed.

It's not a question of what is possible, but of what is probable.  Conservation is our best strategy; it is easier and cheaper to conserve energy than it is to generate it. And many  strategies and technologies that could greatly facilitate that effort already exist.  But many of these stategies will require a radical restructuring of everything from community layout and organization to the the monetary system.  As a permaculture designer Mr. Hemenway would be an excellent reference for how some of these strategies would look.

This statement (#3) is essentially equivsalent to statement number 1, and the same objections to the underlying premise applies.  There are some very heavily invested, very heavily entrenched, and very powerful interests for whom radical restructuring for the sake of conservation would not sit very well.

4. Even with conservation, demand will be more than oil plus alternatives can possibly meet.

Well that's true on the face of it provided you assume that unending economic growth is possible and desirable.  Since unending growth is neither, one must admit that there will come a time when supply and demand will come into balance.  The devil is in the details though.  How painful will that adjustment be?  How painful does it have to be?  

Also, the complexity of a system or a society depends on energetic and material throughput.  Less net available energy will support a less complex society.  Social restructuring played out as a sort of collapse of now overly complex institutions would seem to be the inevitable result of the laws of thermodynamics.

5. Society is so fragile that it cannot withstand large shocks.

This seems to me to be a misdirection.  Any society is precisely as robust as its resource base.  Society is a subset of the ecosystem.  The law of the minimum applies.

Lonnie Brown

I'm in the middle of Collapse by Jarred Diamond. I'm struck by the idea that the cultures decribed are smaller bounded experiments in the question of cultural adjustment to environmental crisis.

When it  was clear to individuals in these cultures the direct limitations of their resource use..i.e. using  all the trees, until there were no more trees on the island --when experienctially the crisis was immediately visable and directly related - experientally - to their own choices and actions - They could not turn the corner once the tipping point had been passed.

We have a mass media - that confuses the issues, muddies the science and supports the wrong players day in and day out...so that people DO NOT make the connection between themselves and the problems we face.

We who spend our lives thinking about this stuff have trouble adjusting our lives to this new reality -- when the question of 'reality' it totally up for grabs with the majority of people.

So many of you seem to assume that there is a 'we' that can be convinced to act 'rationally' -- when in fact there are deeply antagonistic interests at play. We do not live in a rational society - where all options are even handledly reseached and debated by science savvy people - and then voted on by an informed populace...

There is no 'we' to make up our 'mind' and adjust.

People who think we live in an irrational society, with deeply antagonistic interests, are more likely to see "peak oil" as a trigger for greater problems.

But their outlook is driven more by a view of civilization, than a calculation of barrels per day, etc.

"During our great depression people stood in bread lines, they didn't roam the countryside raping and pillaging."

9 out of 10 global conflicts (and by this I mean people coming to your house and killing you and all your children) are not interstate political struggles but intrastate resource struggles.

The day is here. Not at your doorstep, but for much of the world - the day is here.

Anybody ever read Montaigne's Travel Journal?

Year 1580.

And as he travels through France, Austria, Switzerland, Italy ... he meets people that have a "character" much like we find today.

People who worry that western culture is heading for a fall look at current, struggling, nations.  That might be a good instinct, but it should be balanced by a bit of historical perspective.  We have been shaped by our history, just as those struggling peoples have been shaped by theirs.

We have strengths we can stand on.

was a hypochondriac. thousands of complaints..hundreds of dcotors visits, lots of pills.

eventually she died when the limits of her body hit maximum.