Peak Oil On the Ground and in the News

satjeet · Heavy Crude Joined: Jul 15, 2004 Posts: 126

peak oil - and its implications - are so outside what "normal" people consider normal, that it will be denied unto the point of death.

I have a parallel experience - i've attained/endured/enjoyed physical enlightenment - yet find it impossible to discuss with others. They consider it endearing perhaps, but totally unreal. From my perspective they are unaware that they have - or rather are - a physical body.

Someone on this site has said that to understand peak oil is to see the future. It is a kind of enlightenment - every notion has to be re-examined.

bobcousins

That's a really good question and one which I have often wondered about. Unfortunately I have no training in this area, so I would be interested to hear some explanation.

The things that people consider important are so rarely the things that are actually important. I think really this is only surprising if we assume that people are generally operating on rational principles. If we assume that people are irrational and follow the herd it is perhaps not so surprising.

The theory I fall back in these cases is evolution. (To understand why something is built the way it is you must understand the design process). The brain is an onboard computer, designed to cope with change at the day to day basis which evolution is too slow to adapt to. Evolution can equip a predator with sharp teeth and claws. But it is left to the onboard computer to determine what prey is actually available on a daily basis. One day it might be antelope, the next zebra, the next fish.

Another way to look at this is that it is best for the individual to invest resources in producing offspring by exploiting the immediate environment. You must compete with you neighbours. It is no good conserving resources if your neighbour will exploit them : you lose out. If there is a huge problem that affects everyone, then a) there is probably nothing you can do about it, and b) if it happens then we are all dead anyway.

Unfortunately, the way evolution works is that it tends to produce optimised peaks or islands of optimal behaviour. If the climate changes for example, it is difficult to "unadapt" and move back down the peak. This means that specialised creatures hit a evolutionary dead end and die out. More generalised forms can adapt to new peaks. For example, sabre toothed tigers have appeared a number of times in different forms, and died out.

Fortunately, modern humans are supremely adaptable, a result I believe of repeated ice ages, which force life to become adapted to regular and significant climate change. Modern humans supplanted neanderthals because neanderthals were specifically adapted to cold forests, when these were replaced by warm plains, modern humans had a big advantage.

While our current civilisation appears to be overly specialised at exploiting fossil fuels, and must inevitably have to change, the question is will society be able to adapt (history shows that all civilisations eventually collapse, but that does not necessarily mean ours will). At the end of the day, humans could "return to the wild", provided we can hunt food and harness fire. There will be a lot of recently accumulated bad genes that will be shed pretty quickly, we wont have the luxury of modern medicine to work around them.

But I digress. So there are a few reasons why several billion years of evolution instil a very short term outlook into us. Humans are probably unique in their ability to move outside the scope of their regular programming and be able to consider long term problems at all. Relatively speaking we have only just developed this ability, so perhaps we should not expect too much.

Another reason I just thought of, is that if you have limited information about the future, then it is usually best to assume that it will stay like it is currently. People brought up in a time of plenty assume it will always be so. People who are brought up in hardship often assume that conditions could return to that.
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