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Gold/Mining/Energy : PEAK OIL - The New Y2K or The Beginning of the Real End? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kryptonic6 who wrote (734)	6/8/2005 5:27:53 AM
From: Mahatmabenfoo	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1183

Mental illness, funny you should bring up the subject. {yes, I am about to rant and rave again, so be forewarned and welecomed to skip this one with my apologies). On of the subtle aspects of peak oil is a kind of wish fufillment that whatever society may emerge may be a better one. Now there was a lot awful about small town life of 100 years ago -- ignorance, bigotry, conformity. Maybe the best time was circa 1900 with the country and world still filled with mysteries, but steamships and railroads and telegraphs giving some cohesion to the world; but (a happy fantasy I have) singing around pianos rather than being stupified in front of televisions. Was the world less mentally ill back then, or just had less time to wonder if it was depressed? Was it more or less healthy physically back then? We often boast about modern life expectancy, but most of that is explained by surviving the first 10 years of life thanks to antibiotics; 100 years ago many modern ailments such as lung cancer and autism were fundamentally unknown. HERE'S WHAT MAKES ME NUTS. Maybe literally. See the headline below about Global warming. GLOBAL WARMING!!!!!!!!! If the peak oil boys (and they do seem uniformly to be boys) have any validity to their views, global warming is the least of our worries. We won't survive long enough as an industrial culture to complete the job of warming up the planet enough to destroy the polar ice caps -- there isn't enough fossil fuels for the job. If the good aspects of humanity's hard fought for centuries of accumulated knowledge are to survive (together, of course, with the collected fiddle recordings of Jay Ungar and my favorite Hollywood films) it will take the collective intellect and resources of the planet, even including this guy Irving who I don't particular like who lives in Queens, New York. I mean EVERYBODY. What kind of world do we want to live in? What substitutes for petroleum are most promising and who decides which get funded as fossil resources dwindle? Do we really need a subsitute for the current monetary system as we transit to an economy based on sustainability rather than constant but unsustainable growth? And where in the scheme of things will the banjo and the porkpie hat wind up? Okay, I'm being silly. And desparate. Global warming is a diversion, a goofs issue, and if you want to be paranoid, a deliberate misdirection. Listen to "The End of Suburbia" and you can't help but conclude that the biggest shitstorm humanity has ever faced is going to smack us like a tsunami soon -- maybe starting next year -- with $20 gallon gasoline enough to crash stock markets and start panics and senidng a crazed populace to all the wrong conclusions. Or worse -- MUCH worse -- the Saudis will artificially stave off depletion for a few years, and then when it comes instead of a 2% or 4% decline we'll face 14% or 18% or unimaginably worse drop offs in oil just about the time natural gas peters out because it doesn't follow a bell curve, it's a vapor, it GOES. Against that chance of that -- even a 10% chance of such horrors -- the melting of the the ice caps in 40 years is as stupid as hyping fuel cells cars that that run on hydrogen which would be great if we had any hydrogen (or enough platinum for that matter). MENTAL ILLNESS? Somebody is nuts. I mean complete crackers -- lost it, no perspective, focusing on all the wrong things to the doom of the world. I hope the hell it's me. - name with held on my request because it's sorta funny for me to type that ============== HEADLINE TODAY "Scientists Call for Action on Climate Change By Jeremy Lovell, Reuters The Greenhouse Effect LONDON, (June 7) - Scientists, including from the United States and China, threw down the gauntlet to world leaders on Tuesday saying mankind was the major source of global warming and urging action, one month ahead of a G8 summit. As leaders of the Group of Eight industrial nations prepare to meet in Scotland -- with climate change and Africa at the top of the agenda -- a statement by the national science academies of 11 countries said: "It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities.