20 trillion oil in sa, page-53

cainus: No, that's not what I was saying, yes, you misunderstood.

If things are being done unsustainably and can no longer be done sustainably, a crash is inevitable. I think we all agree on that, and most would agree that we are in that situation now, yet most fail to see the inevitability of the crash. I think we're delusional or uninformed if we think we can save our civilisation from a massive crash in the not too distant future. Human nature is to consume, it always has been, no exceptions on the scale of a population/civilisation, only in small numbers of individuals, and even then they're usually kidding themselves (people recycle a few bottles and newspapers, reducing their impact by a negligible fraction of one percent, and act like they're saving the planet even though they're having the same impact as anyone else, that kind of thing).

It's completely unrealistic to think that even 1% of the world's population would switch to a selfless, sustainable way of living, and even if well over half the population did this we'd still be completely screwed. Anyone who actually does live sustainably will be out in the forest somewhere, not influencing others, and even that's unsustainable because we don't have enough wilderness for everyone to do that in. You can't save the civilisation any more than you can change basic human nature, because that would be required to do so.

The problem is just too severe for people to collectively acknowledge it, though they used to. I remember in the 80s and 90s people talking about quite specific timeframes of how long we had left to turn things around before global collapse was inevitable. Presumably if you think back, you will too. I was a school kid at the time, too young to calculate such things on my own, but being at school I heard a lot of the stories. I remember hearing those time frames getting closer and closer, ending somewhere in the 90s, and a couple of years or so before the supposed deadline I stopped hearing about it. The time came and went, nothing happened, as a uni student I assumed it was just some 80s and 90s hippy rhetoric. Quite some years later I had forgotten about those stories, I started investing, I wondered what industries to look at. I looked at what people consumed, what was in demand, what was scarce, what was likely to become more valuable over time. This lead me to take a good hard look at oil and I was shocked to come to the conclusion that collapse was inevitable (a side realisation from thinking about what to invest in). It then occurred to me that it was very much like those stories I heard at school, and was startled to realise I'd independently come up to almost exactly the same timeframe (not too surprising really since I was probably using a lot of the same figures including population estimates, projections, resource statistics, etc., and some of the predictions from 10 years ago had been pretty accurate).

If your supplies are limited, everything seems completely fine right up until the moment your supplies are exhausted. If you've fallen off a cliff, you don't get hurt until you hit the ground. In the mean time denial or delusion is pretty easy.

Do you remember what they were saying in the 90s about how long we had left to turn things around or the planet and/or civilisation was doomed? This wasn't some obscure thing being said by only a few people, it was widely, publicly being spoken about for years, and scientists acknowledged it at the time. You trust your climate scientists (even the way the media distorts their message) but seem to disagree with what the scientists found about inevitable global collapse.