Peak Oil Wisdom
Phil recently wrote in asking about the sidebar “Peak Oil Wisdom” featuring quotes about Peak Oil from around the internet. I started the quotes while playing with wordpress a couple of years ago, and as I played, I realized that with only 50 or so quotes, one could almost capture the whole peak oil story, predicament and scope of approrpriate responses. Playing with the order may vary the mileage, but I really think the useful thinking is nearly all contained in these quotes.
I add to them from time to time, but I think the collection can stand on its own as it is today.
Phil had asked for a list of the quotes we use, so I thought I would share them with everyone, in case others are interested in seeing the list all together.
There are a couple of quotes that aren’t specifically peak oil related. The financial ones are not what I am talking about. The financial system is absolutely bound up in all of this. If you don’t understand that, refer to our “Finance & Peak Oil Investment Strategies” recommended websites section The one that isn’t peak oil related is Frank Tibolt’s:
We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.
I put this quote in because so many people seem to learn about peak oil on the internet, but then get stuck in the loop of learning about it. They don’t seem to find that exit from learning into doing.
Greer talks about some of these problems in his latest post, because it’s still quite an epidemic among peak oilers. If the top layers of society are collapsing, then change will be bottom up, whether it is change out of a planned effort like transition towners imagine, or whether it a messy and improvisational change arising out of needs and crisis (we expect the latter!). But, change will certainly happen, so if you are unimpressed with change at Obama’s level, consider change at your household level.
Frank’s quote reminds us that this is how we inspire others, but I think what’s more compelling is that this is how you protect yourself, and your family. Giving yourself options and resiliency is rewarding and fun even if the rest of the world doesn’t understand you yet.
Anyway, I think you get the point.
I’ll let the rest of these quotes speak for themselves. Enjoy!
| The economists all think that if you show up at the cashier’s cage with enough currency, God will put more oil in the ground. |
| – Ken Deffeyes |
| Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money. |
| – Daniel Webster |
| We’ve got to find a way out of the incessant motoring and a way to live without it, and a happy way to live without it—not a punishment way to live without it, but a way to be happy and do it. |
| – James Howard Kunstler |
| It is to be expected that we will run out of fossil fuels before we run out of optimists, who are, along with fools and madmen, a renewable resource. |
| – Dmitry Orlov |
| We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. |
| – Albert Einstein |
| The idea that we can simply replace this fossil legacy – and the extraordinary power densities it gives us – with ambient energy is the stuff of science fiction. There is simply no substitute for cutting back. |
| – George Monbiot |
| When the pie starts shrinking, then you are going to see people taking pie from other people. That’s when the chaos begins. |
| – Jay Hansen |
| In my dealings with a lot of the optimists, they don’t have the vaguest understanding of how complicated it is to actually drill a well. |
| – Matt Simmons |
| Apparently the U.S. economy is a sort of pyramid scheme, based on nothing more than faith in its growth potential, and can only continue to exist while it continues to expand, by sucking in ever more resources, particularly energy. |
| – Dmitry Orlov |
| I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. |
| – Thomas Edison |
| People who own cars have more money than people at risk of starvation. In a contest between their demand for fuel and poor people’s demand for food, the car-owners win every time. |
| – George Monbiot |
| The real question they should be asking is, not where are we going to get more oil, but how can we control men when there’s no economic growth? That’s the question. |
| – Jay Hansen |
| Far from being “efficient”, the so-called “market system” is probably the MOST INEFFICIENT social organization possible! The overhead (commuting to work, banks, insurance companies, advertising agencies, etc.) associated with our present way of organizing consumes the largest fraction BY FAR of our natural resources – something like 2 trillion tonnes of oil equivalent per year! |
| – Jay Hansen |
| Other nations are forced to export products to the United States because this is the only way for them to gather the dollars they need to purchase oil. |
| – Dmitry Orlov |
| Economists are starting to look a bit ridiculous, as their predictive abilities are repeatedly shown to be quite feeble. Moreover, the whole discipline of economics is starting to become irrelevant, because its main concern is with characterizing a system – the fossil fuel-based growth economy – which is starting to collapse. |
| – Dmitry Orlov |
| The passing of abundant oil is not shaping up to be a soft landing for those with the fattest asses. |
| – Jan Lundberg |
| The issue is not so much what form of technology is more terrible, but how many people are engaging in the technologies. There appears to be very little thought given to how large a population size is sustainable with a renewable-energy economy. |
| – Jan Lundberg |
| The combined weight of all these boondoggles is slowly but surely pushing us all down. If it pushes us down far enough, then economic collapse, when it arrives, will be like falling out of a ground floor window. We just have to help this process along, or at least not interfere with it. So if somebody comes to you and says “I want to make a boondoggle that runs on hydrogen” – by all means encourage him! It’s not as good as a boondoggle that burns money directly, but it’s a step in the right direction. |
| – Dmitry Orlov |
| It takes a lot of creativity and effort to put together a fulfilling existence on the margins of society. After the collapse, these margins may turn out to be some of the best places to live. |
| – Dmitry Orlov |
| Economic collapse has a way of turning economic negatives into positives. The last thing we want is a perfectly functioning, growing, prosperous economy that suddenly collapses one day, and leaves everybody in the lurch. |
| – Dmitry Orlov |
| It’s not about keeping your hands clean or avoiding guilt. Imagine birds living in a forest. Humans come and cut the forest down and build barns and plant crops. If some birds are able to live in the barns, or eat the crops, they don’t say, “I’m not going to live in the barn — that’s cheating,” or “I’m not going to eat the crops, because then I’m just part of the system.” Of all the species on Earth, only humans are that stupid. |
| – Ran Prieur |
| The only subject under discussion about our energy predicament is how can we keep running all our cars by other means. Even the leading environmentalists talk of little else. We don’t get it. |
| – James Howard Kunstler |
| Our leaders don’t have the courage to tell us that we can’t continue to live this way, because too many jobs, incomes, and votes would have to go with it. |
| – James Howard Kunstler |
| I always tell them to learn skills. You know the saying: get a fish, eat for a day; learn to fish, eat for a lifetime. (Just don’t take it too literally — there might not be any fish left!) |
| – Ran Prieur |
| The economist sees the environment as a subsystem of the economy, rather than the other way around. In other words, economists are trained to believe that natural resources come from “markets” rather than the “environment”. |
| – Jay Hansen |
| As long as we believe in fairy tales of a new and better America for clean, continued consumption, instead of first dismantling the present system and building true alternatives on a local scale, we are eating BS for breakfast lunch and dinner. |
| – Jan Lundberg |
| It took Homo sapiens over 200 years to accept the Copernican theory and the species has yet to accommodate the Darwinian theory. Consequently I see little chance that it will face the looming decline of industrial civilization in time to change course. |
| – Richard Duncan |
| Green plants in the United States collect about 53 exajoules of energy per year from sunlight. Americans consume slightly more than twice that amount, however. |
| – David Pimentel and Ted Patzek |
| Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. |
| – Kenneth Boulding |
| The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. |
| – Albert A. Bartlett |
| All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation. |
| – John Adams |
| In many places, it feels as if there just isn’t that much left that’s worth trying to save. If all the culture we see is commercial culture, and all the society we see is consumer society, then the best we can do is walk away from it, and look for other people who are ready to do the same. |
| – Dmitry Orlov |
| Currently, the political class couldn’t be farther from understanding what is about to happen. I listened in on one of the recent presidential debates. It struck me that the two candidates spent most of the time arguing over ways of spending money that they don’t have. |
| – Dmitry Orlov |
| I do believe we have peaked out at 85 million barrels a day globally |
| – T. Boone Pickens |
| The American people are going to pay a terrible price for not having had an energy strategy. |
| – Robert Gates |
| The economy we’re moving into will have to be one of real work, producing real things of value, at a scale consistent with energy resource reality. |
| – James Howard Kunstler |
| Declining civilizations always seem to get prophets who insist that some vast and improbable transformation will suddenly replace their civilization with the kind of society they would rather inhabit. They are always wrong. |
| – John Michael Greer |
| Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes it’s laws. |
| – Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild |
| We are in danger of being overwhelmed with irredeemable paper, mere paper, representing not gold nor silver; no sir, representing nothing but broken promises, bad faith, bankrupt corporations, cheated creditors and a ruined people. |
| – Daniel Webster |
| We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action. |
| – Frank Tibolt |
| The science is clear: The use of corn and other biofuels to solve our energy problem is an ethically, economically, and environmentally unworkable sham. |
| – David Pimentel / http://kennebecjournal.mainetoday.com/view/columns/4793307.html |
| Growth is dead. Let’s make the most of it. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. |
| – Richard Heinberg / http://postcarbon.org/end_growth |
| I think the worst case scenario is actually happening. Price of oil is going down but don’t kid yourself, depletion will bite our ass even faster as we will not be able to make the necessary investments in new oil production or energy alternatives. |
| – Khebab / http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4629 |
| In the United States, cheap fossil fuel has eroded communities. We’re the first people with no real practical need for each other. Everything comes from a great distance through anonymous and invisible transactions. |
| – Bill McKibben / http://www.progressive.org/node/124963 |
| there’s no meaningful sense of the adjective “sustainable” that can cohabit with any meaningful sense of the noun “growth.” In a system – any system, anywhere – growth is always unsustainable. |
| – John Michael Greer / http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/02/overcoming-systems-stupidity.html |
Cheers,
-Robert
