The Colbert Report takes on James Howard Kunstler, who is the John the Baptist figure of peak oil – a voice that’s been crying in the wilderness for a long time, that is. For all the talk about Kunstler’s new book, “World Made By Hand – A Novel,” nobody seems to be talking about it as a fictional work – as with the World Without Oil game, it’s a veneer of fiction painted on a cold hard potential reality. Watch the Colbert report segment.
Who’s saying what
| Last week’s le… on ‘to actually see it star… | |
 | Justin Morrissey on Portugal leads the electric… |
 | Luke on What peak oil really mean… |
| Luke on Leaving oil before oil leaves… |
 | Jake on The Petrol War, 2000 |
1 comment
Comments feed for this article
May 5, 2008 at 6:10 am
PeakProphet
Hi Ken,
I was really excited to discover this blog and see the various ways WWO has continued in the cyber world. I don’t need to tell you or any of the readers that we may be in the blossoming stages of living it in the real world right now. This NY Times article is particularly illustrative:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/business/worldbusiness/28oil-WEB.html
This is the kind of article that one of the WWO netizens might have created, yet there it is! I hope some policymakers, or someone goes through all of the WWO creative input and use it to extrapolate where it goes from here. So far everything is matching up eerily well. Local gardens are on the rise, the farmers markets are flooded with people and sell out long before the market closes, people are cutting back, people in poorer countries are starving; it’s deja vu.
For my own part, we haven’t been able to move forward with preparing our own land, as our old place in Washington state on the Olympic Peninsula has not sold — and therefore we can’t pay off our place here. Luckily, we are working on some land that belongs to a friend (their family has 500+ acres), and we’ve got a ton of food started on several acres. There are ponds there with plenty of fish, turkey, deer, geese, ducks, and adequate fresh water. With the addition of all the food we’re growing, it will be self-sufficient by the end of the fall. Now our trouble is that there are a lot of people who know about this, and were a crisis to come would want to eat the food, not knowing that it takes months of back breaking work to get the food grown. That’s one of the major problems I am discovering about people’s mindsets, and it was true in the WWO too: people want to step in after all the work is done and have a “finished product” ready for their consumption. Experiencing the lifecycle of anything is a completely foreign concept. If people knew how much energy and mechanization went into everything they take for granted, they simply would not believe it. And, as the price and scarcity of oil marches relentlessly upward, many individual parts of the system will begin to fail under the stress, causing people to abruptly “discover” how much complexity is behind the scenes.
I visited the old WWO site today partly out of nostalgia, but also out of a desire to look at the early posts and such to see how that world now mirrors our own. I wonder if we could do some sort of bullet point list of things that happened per week and see if we spot trends and align them?
Anyway, it’s great to still be a part of the WWO family, and I hope others who are still involved will say hi.
All my best,
Jason
aka PeakProphet