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173 comments on How to Address Contrarian Arguments - part I

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totoneila on November 22, 2006 - 12:19am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
Hello Luis,

TOD/EUR is one place I am going to have to check more often because of the quality of the posts!  Hopefully more Americans will become concerned enough to check what is happening on 'the other side of the pond'.

As I see it, the biggest problem overcoming denial of Peakoil is that right at the Peak is when there is the maximum of everything.

Plastic junk, # of car & SUV models, cheap vacation flights, grocery stores full of food choices flown & trucked in from who knows where all year round, cheap computers and other appliance items, maximum extent of maintained asphalt & concrete roads,...on and on!

People cannot believe it could ever end! Their eyes, ears, sense of touch and taste, even their emotional desires are maximized to the full extent they can afford.

Even if you are a poor Bangladeshi, who has never known anything but a bare subsistence lifestyle: as long as your decline occurs slowly so as not to radically jar your memory: he still cannot comprehend the true magnitude of the forces arrayed against him.

It is only when a person truly engages their grey matter above the higher level of the lizard brain that they wake-up and say 'uh- oh, something is not right with my mental picture".

Even I find it very hard to overcome my senses in terms of Peak Everything.  A good mental 'grasp' of the true situation is like wanting to hold a red-hot steel poker in your bare hand.   Sometimes, even I get burned out on PO + GW and have to temporarily withdraw into what I call my happy, mindless idiot mode.  The truth hurts.

Bob Shaw in Phx,Az  Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?  

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Luis de Sousa on November 22, 2006 - 5:05am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Yes totoneila, people in the wealthy countries are completely alienated by all the comforts of modern day oil driven life.

Inebriated by all that comfort and easy living, they lost contact with the physical realities of the environment where they live. The more they break the physical constraints around them the harder it gets to see the consequences.  

They don't know it, but they are On The Edge of Time.

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Engineer-Poet on November 24, 2006 - 11:17am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
This is exactly the sort of thing which should be used to populate a Wiki:  "Index to Cornucopian Claims".  A little editting and some links (e.g. showing the growing effort and energy required to recover oil) would finish the job.
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Seadragon on November 23, 2006 - 10:02pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
What a great response, Bob.  Captured my feelings about it perfectly. I sometimes vacillate between "how can this all end" and "how can it not"--looking at my countrymen mindlessly consuming everything in sight really gives me that feeling of "nausea" lads referred to.
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