[SeaGypsy]

Hey all;

just having a bit of a heart to heart with another regular here- we got into a discussion about why we both keep coming back to peakoil.com.

We both agreed that when surrounded by the vast majority attitudes in real life- there is a sense of solace here in being in communication with others who are seeking the same solace.

We discussed what it might be that creates in certain people this all too rare desire to respond directly to the key issue of our times. We agree that a core trait seems to be an intellectual courage far above the norm. Not necessarily a massive intellect.

Also the point came up- how we have gotten to the point now where we are essentially re-hashing virtually every topic under discussion- which is getting a little tired- whilst waiting for the truly catalytic events we have so long anticipated.

Often now- we who have so much more in common than we do apart- are finding ourselves 'nit picking' each other- looking for and focusing on what are actually minor differences of opinion on specific subjects.

As strange as it is- being anonymous in form- this peakoil.com has many of the essential aspects of a community. There are a core crew of us here of 50-100 who at least check in every day- barring some unusual personal event preventing our doing so.

The friend I mention and I have taken what is for both of us- perhaps everyone outside the moderator's circle- the very unusual step of 'hooking up' on the much more personal forum of face book (space deliberate).

There are said to be over a billion face book users now in the world. Some of the folks here I would like to connect more with I have invited- but have been told they 'don't participate'- in face book- 'too busy', 'spending too much time online anyway', 'not interested in learning how to use another site', and I suspect some are somewhat paranoid of face book's spying and privacy implications.

Anyhow- some points there open for discussion!

(Not intended as an advertisement for face book- simply an acknowledgement of this forum as a community, as well as of that particular host site as overwhelmingly popular. Love it or hate it- FB is an incredible tool,)

[Shaved Monkey]

I was introduced to the site by a friend in real life
He doesnt post much on here, mainly lurks
But we have our own personal PO forum over coffee in the real world.
Usually based on what we read on this site recently.
Its good to think out scenarios ,then talk them out and dismiss or introduce new concepts and giving it a local perspective.
PO will be different for everyone depending on climate,locale and country and your economic situation within it.
Kind of good having a fair few PO aware people in town too and finding more quite regularly.

[Beery1]

I came here to keep abreast of peak oil news, but recently, with the forums awash in a sea of global climate change, 9/11 nuttiness, natural disasters, Obama-baiting, nuclear power, electric cars, nuclear weapons, wacky conspiracy theories, ancient aliens and pie-in-the-sky technology posts, and scams such as the LENR, E-cat, Rossi and Defkalion nonsense - i.e. anything BUT peak oil, and since actual posts on peak oil are becoming a rarity here, I'm beginning to wonder why I bother.

Then there's the obvious forum abuse of some members being left unmoderated, such as comment-free copying and pasting of articles from other websites, purely intended as spam or troll posts. These are clearly intended to derail discussion, but no one seems to care to point them out, let alone censure the abusers. And when someone does have the temerity to call these folks out, moderators seem more willing to jump on the folks doing the calling-out, rather than the spammers.

I am one of those who checks in daily, and I used to enjoy the community aspects too, but to be honest, when 75% of the posts that appear here every day have nothing to do with peak oil, and with the most prolific posters in the community obviously more interested in other things, it becomes a challenge to keep checking in.

I just wish Peak Oil News and Message Boards could be about peak oil again.

[Scrub Puller]

Yair . . . Dunno. I came over here from TOD and I must say I find this site far less user friendly and at times downright disconcerting.

I have been aware of "peak oil" and recourse limits since way before the internet and find it remarkable that so few people post on sites such as this.

Things stagger on and, until such time as folks are hurting, really hurting from fuel and energy prices I don't think anything will change, it is very hard to get into a serious discussion about energy matters in the wider community with out causing eyes to glaze over and have the conversation turned back to important topics such as foot ball or whatever.

Unlike others I quite enjoy the range of discussion here, particularly alternative transport, electric cars and so forth. If anyone has bothered to look at a link I posted on the permie thread I have invested ten years of development and many thousands of dollars in an electric and solar powered rotary farming system that can make small scale farming viable.

It perhaps is an indication of the lack of understanding here as to how things work in the real world that it has not attracted a single comment. (wry grin)

Cheers

[Shaved Monkey]

I came here to keep abreast of peak oil news, but recently, with the forums awash in a sea of global climate change, 9/11 nuttiness, natural disasters, Obama-baiting, nuclear power, electric cars, nuclear weapons, wacky conspiracy theories, ancient aliens and pie-in-the-sky technology posts, and scams such as the LENR, E-cat, Rossi and Defkalion nonsense - i.e. anything BUT peak oil, and since actual posts on peak oil are becoming a rarity here, I'm beginning to wonder why I bother.

Most off these things are PO related though
The clutching at straws, the blame game, the conspiracies,the environmental impact, the political blame game are all part of PO.
People will get angrier and more desperate and look for scape goats and solutions.
The price and supply of energy is not just in the price and supply of oil.

[dorlomin]

What do people expect to say on a daily basis about peak oil? It is something that resolves itself in monthly and annual oil out put statistics. I you want to start a conversation about something, start a thread, if you dont want to talk about something dont click on the thread. Peak oil is not a fast moving story but it lies behind so many of the other stories in the news.

[Tanada]

Peak Oil, can't see the forest for the trees. I think the vast majority of the public still does not associate the end of cheap oil with their local economic woes. I used to work with several volunteer fire fighters including a local chief who was my boss in his second job. His major concern was getting enough money budgeted to fuel costs because not only has their equipment fuel cost quadrupled since 2005, getting people to volunteer and drive in when called for a minor event is getting herder and harder. Sure the volunteers can claim fuel costs on their taxes at the end of the year, but they have to pay for it in the short run. The municipal police department and ambulance services are also having fuel cost problems, the Monroe county sheriff department furloughed 60% of the deputies because they could not afford to keep them patrolling. Labor used to be the major cost the department faced, now fuel is a close second even after they cut staff and lowered the level of active patrols vs call responses. They used to have a large reserve force, the Sheriffs Posse, people with horses who volunteered to bring their horses to help work at parades and events at the county and township fair/carnivals. Most of them stopped participating because it is expensive and time consuming to load their horses in a trailer and drive it to the rally area, then volunteer work for a full shift before reversing the process.

Peak cheap oil has changed America in the midwest in a thousand ways, but if you don't actively look for those changes you miss them because you are caught up in your day to day life.

[Tanada]

Oh yeah forgot to say, I keep coming back because some of the people here are also aware of the changes so participating here makes reality seem more believable. All the $100.00/bbl oil they pull out of fractured shale is good for the plateau, but it sure hasn't fixed the lack of cheap oil part of the problem.

[dorlomin]

Peak Oil, can't see the forest for the trees. I think the vast majority of the public still does not associate the end of cheap oil with their local economic woes.

The biggest news story in the UK over the past few months has been domestic energy costs. Home heating. High natural gas prices and massive drops in North Sea production, plus a lack of preparedness for this inevitability has led the UK some eyewatering price increases.

Its not sold as a peak resources story. Its sold as a story about privitisation, climate change costs, market regulation and other agendas.

But Marion King Hubbert's graph is the right there.



"Global" peak oil may not be obvious right now, but our local peak oil story is one of people having to chose between food and heating and this in one of the worlds most developed economies.

[Rod_Cloutier]

There's only one other site I've found on the web like peakoil.com, and I don't visit there very often:

http://tpuc.org/forum/index.php

The people at peakoil.com ARE better.

This is a place you can field ideas from other news sites for critical comment by seasoned experts. After listening to the excellent but damming replies about the infeasibility of my original posts here about space based resources, that I made back in 2004, I kept coming, almost daily to field my ideas to others highly critical thought. (Where else can you do this and expect a reply?)

The responses to my posts, have made me rethink politics, economics, resource limits, peak oil, global finance, chem-trails, 9/11 (for which I had originally believed the official story), and other concerns.

This is also an indispensable site for links to newsworthy sites and current information. I'll keep coming back so long as this site keeps ticking.

I go on face book maybe once a month. It's 99% infotainment and not worth the time. (Other than to see new baby photo's ect, for distantly located family members, ect.)

[dolanbaker]

What do people expect to say on a daily basis about peak oil? It is something that resolves itself in monthly and annual oil out put statistics. I you want to start a conversation about something, start a thread, if you dont want to talk about something dont click on the thread. Peak oil is not a fast moving story but it lies behind so many of the other stories in the news.

I have always likened peak oil to coastal erosion, in the background each and every day a piece of coastline moves towards the populated areas of the country. The only people who notice are the local farmers & the council.

Every once in a while a storm removes a large chunk of land or threatens seaside property, then everyone is demanding action and the council dump a few lorry loads of rock to delay the erosion for a while.
It then goes all quiet for a while.
It's quiet at the moment! But we still come here to get an early warning for when the next storm is due.

[Peak_Yeast]

Im here since its the easiest way for me to follow the progress. Normally it was the drumbeat at the oil drum i used to read every other day. Now its here.

Its impossible for me to find all those small steps from a 1000 news sources, blogs and so forth. - So visiting here is like having a 1000 eyes looking for me following the omnicide and degradation of our planet and essential resources. As well as the technological progress being made that are supposed to mitigate our self-inflicted slow-mo-death by a 1000 cuts.

[Quinny]

Come here to listen to opinions and learn. Planning forum not as busy as previously since Ludi and Shanny and others left miss their input. I used to love listening to Reverse Engineer, but also (think it was) Mr Bill (European capitalist) who have totally different views, but got me thinking.

I suppose a bit of me hopes for a solution, but realistically I've accepted that we are witnessing a predicament that there is no solution to. The trolls are usually entertaining, but still the only solutions they put forward are unrealistic and sometimes simply ridiculous.

I've learned a lot from the links I follow and I'm too busy/lazy to assemble my own links. Feel like I know many of the people here despite never having met. Being in a different timezone can cause communication issues but not too many. When I had no Internet for a few days I did miss checking in.

Would like to FB with others as I use it daily to contact family back in UK. I like the forum style.

Scrub Puller I found your project very interesting but I haven't enough land to use it.

[Scrub Puller]

Yair . . . Gotcha Quinny. Each circle is a half acre you can work as many as you like . . . all the permaculture stuff can grow between, the unit can be made to pass over fruit trees animal shelters and so on as it shifts to another site.

Cheers.

[cualcrees]

Since you mention Facebook; is there a "peakoil.com" facebook group o page?

[Pops]

I come here because I can talk about whatever subject knowing that everyone understands the subtext is PO. So whether I'm going on about US politics, the economy or my old truck I know that most of the folks who read my ramble have the same frame of reference, whether or not they have or agree with my opinion regarding PO.

We just about crapped out there for a while from bugs and spam, kudos to admin (and DaveP) for getting the site back in line and of course to admin for underwriting the whole thing for 10 years but also to the members who stuck it out when posting was pretty well impossible.

It's been pretty interesting to be involved over the years and see the evolution. We had a certain esprit de corps early on but we also had some conflict as we sought out the "personality" of PO.com. One thing that may be unique to PO.com is that admin has pretty well let the mods and members set the direction. We seemed to have settled on a pretty good balance of low key moderation and open access.

[rollin]

I came to PeakOIl.com several years after I became interested in the concept of peak oil. It's a great active site that provides interesting news articles and forum posts. Having a deep interest in global warming for many years, the shift to global warming topics does not bother me at all. Of course global warming is well tied into oil use.

The posts lately have become somewhat repetitive and well off peak oil, but that is easily explained by the quasi plateau period not providing enough articles to keep the peakoil system running. All the big authors and presenters have had their say about peak oil and diminishing resources. Now many are getting quieter and moving on to preparation and mitigation.

One of the main reasons I stay with PeakOil is the ability to comment and message board without being tied to the big social media. I quit Ciimate ThinK Progress when they changed their format. I always picked up good ideas there and useful links from the commenters. Now the level of commenting has fallen dramatically down to Joe Street level and is not very useful. I drop in once in a while in the hope Joe Romm has seen the light and switched back to the old comment format. So far no joy there.

The Oil Drum was a great site for higher level discussion of peak oil and gas. Now that it is gone, PeakOil will have to carry the load. Eventually as oil and other resources slide into more obvious depletion, the site will need a new direction and a name change.

I notice other sites dying out and people going off in their own directions in response to peak oil. Whatever the future holds it will be dramatically different than lately and places like PeakOil at least give that idea a place to live.

[davep]

There is obviously an appetite for the subject matter. I just checked the main Forums page and saw current online users as 23 registered, 5 hidden and 593 guests

[Paulo1]

I came over here daily after TOD closed. I have to agree with Scrub that the site is not as user friendly. My original posting name from a few years ago was frozen one day, or something went haywire, so I was forced to re-register. Sometimes, when I save comments they simply disappear. I then just give up and don't bother for awhile having wasted a lot of time writing.

I just retired so I check the site for new topics when I come in for breaks or at lunch. Of course having said that I just realized a new job is starting up so it will now be just breakfast or evening. The comments are mostly polite and really worthwhile reading. Other sites are flippant or profane, and I think it is because they use their phones and the small screens foster this trend. Or, the twits have been twiterized. I am pleased to see compadres over here from TOD, and know that many others are still reading. Great to read Rockman and RockDoc, and others with industry experience.

I return here because there is nothing else, really. Yes, we rehash the same topics over and over, but once in awhile I get the slap in the face moment and try and grasp what is going to happen in just a few years. We can argue and prognosticate the details again and again, but clearly our world will be very different with ever increasing energy costs. I am more interested in the topics of transition, (believing PO is simply fact), but sites such as Resilience don't appeal to my/our situation or mindset. I mean, if I tried to start a transition group in my valley I would get laughed out of my socks. There are very few around me who are PO aware, and those of us in agreement are so independent we don't join groups beyond a few drinks or an occasional party. Great and helpful neighbours, but group plans....not so much.

Thank you all for the data and stats re: energy. Those who compile the graphs and other visuals to complement the numbers have been helpful. I used some of these visuals over the years for presentations...always citing their source, of course. Being able to read current work by Heinberg and Jeffrey Brown, and read comments from others has been a gift.

Paulo