A confrontation to change can rocket through our mind, checking our beliefs, producing internal thoughts, then emotions and then action pertaining to denial or acceptance… thoughts at the speed of light, even if the change suggestion is novel and new and poof out comes either denial, confusion, reluctant acceptance or excited energy.
When fossil fuel use was unleased and facilitated the industrial revolution it unleased curiosity and open minds to perhaps most, over time, in typical technical adoption curves, regarding what was becoming possible. Open minds much more often welcome change or at least reluctant acceptance and some positive energy. New opportunities are the most fertile ground for change. We need to understand this and communicate opportunities (but real opportunities) when it comes to the change in front of us regarding peak energy. Most of the peak energy proponents (myself included) tend to well understand the role energy has played in the industrial revolution and our current lifestyles. Trying to put lipstick on a pig and say aspects of life need to go back to some degree to how things were before say 1850 is a plain old unwelcome notion (we don’t want a return of the daily water bucket routine) with little opportunity or mastery percieved. To a great many having energy shortages forcing us to go back in time flashes through our beliefs, fires neurons that express thoughts that say “that would suck and its not acceptable”, with the resulting emotions and then the reaction tends to be something along the line of “don’t worry they and their technologies will fix it”. There - the one reality station had bad programming, but the channel has been turned and this podcast is telling me what I want to hear - whether it is real or not… still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
There are those who embrace a lower energy approach and lifestyle. What did they find positive? What were the new opportunities in the change that they embraced? Many will talk about going back to a simpler time. To being less on grid and to less rat race. Many will talk about regaining some of what we have lost. People stand on fake Mainstreet Disneyland to nostalgically regale in what once was, quant shops with local owners who know us and join us for a slice of pie in a quant restaurant with another local owner who knows us, after having collectively having enjoyed local community theatre. We go visit the Amish for food we cherish and to buy hand made furniture that will be with us for the rest of our lives. There is a blend of ye’ ole with the electronic present that many of us can see great opportunity in, that we need to really develop into a shared new vision for how we will collectively live using less energy (because supply says there is no other option until some additional energy technologies can hit mass adoption). There is much in that vision that can provide massive opportunity, for most, such that we can pursue it with happy vigor, while also minimizing an otherwise unavoidable crash. To deny a peak energy crash reality because emotions got the best of us isn’t to wake up with a boo boo but to try to recover from the injuries of a head-on high-speed collision and in my view peak energy is playing a role in policies being forced upon us, in the hyper inflation we see and in the reduction of standards of living being forced upon us.
Rational hope is not the same thing as wishful thinking—rational hope is hope based on logic, not blind belief, and for that reason it is significantly more powerful than the alternative. The “they will solve it with their unknown technologies” story gets rightly minimized with logic in rational hope until facts come forward for logic to say otherwise.
“At the end of the day, almost everything one sees in the news is a theatrical production of a very specific kind, in which the majority of participants have no clue they’re living in a movie, and where most of the features of the movies are decidedly NON-fictional. The spin is fictional—the thing being spun is real. Often times, people get upset with those saying such things because they think that you’re somehow denying the death toll caused by these theatrical productions, but that is just lazy thinking. It has been well stated “the news is fake, but the war is real”. How long will it take for people to finally grasp that concept?” says Badlands Media Much power is at least partly derived from the sleeping, unaware masses. A big part of fake news job, much like a hypnotist is to keep the masses lulled… you’re getting very sleepy… they have it all under control with their new technologies cause they love you… leave control in their hands…
Certainly there is so much confronting us in our daily lives from say access to family doctors, timely medical care, immigration matters, housing, protecting freedoms, carbon taxes (cows and farms supposedly needing to be shut down) and perhaps the biggest – inflation, that many would struggle to see peak energy rising now to be perhaps the highest concern but I humbly submit, as this newsletter briefs on month in and month out, that those who get to control energy, likely is the driving factor behind the curtain on driving forward the crazy policies we see. I get there by following the money, knowing very well that energy is, the master currency! The most obvious money trail is how energy drives a whole lot of inflation because energy price increases force price increases of most everything else, as I have written about many times!
Further understanding regarding other confronting issues requires more following the money through rabbit holes. How does creating problems and then having surprisingly fast “solutions” so often, just by luck of course, just happen to make the epically rich, richer? If you doubt that is the case, go back over the biggest problems we have seen in the last four years and see if you end up still doubting a consolidation of wealth. Fact is confronting issues like “covid” have resulted in the largest and fastest consolidation of wealth ever witnessed globally.
By way of a quick simplified further example, there was a time in the earliest of days of the oil and gas industry, in Pennsylvania, that rivers were so polluted that they lit on fire and burned for weeks and months. Obviously, a real problem and oil and gas had to clean up its environmental act and they did.
Now we have part of the environmental movement (infiltrated in a significant way) and a huge debate as to whether CO² is still a fundamental ingredient for life, like water and oxygen or very often just a pollutant too. Under auspices of being a huge problem, the solution posed is taxation, digital ID’s so we can track carbon footprints and so on and so forth. It has obviously become a very complicated hairball with ramifications going everywhere including inflation, freedoms and even immigration. It has quickly gone to “data centers need priority of energy use because carbon footprint tracking globally is of the highest priority solution to save the planet”. No? Albeit I have simplified it all greatly and likely overly so, for brevity.
Might it be the epically wealthy saw the reality of peak energy quite some time ago and easily realized, we can’t just seize these resources and maintain the support of the masses? Might they have been clever enough to see they needed several proceeding steps in getting there? Many have rightly pointed out the simplified chain of coincidences that went from 1) Problem – Global warming/climate change 2) Solutions – Reduce fossil fuel consumption, shut down farms, tax the formerly free CO², etc. (see
View: https://x.com/JohnBarlowMP/status/1853049990329016793 for sample) 3) New problem – Rampant inflation, etc. causing such chaos (confusion, fear, fatigue) that few can see clearly if the leaves being hacked off the weedy dandelions of the myriad of problems are remotely getting at the root of real problems 4) Additional solution – The problems globally are so big that only world gov’t with new tools of digital ID’s for carbon tracking (coincidentally like in Hong Kong recently, there becomes no way to protest) and AI can save humanity. Neat how coincidentally the epically rich end up owning the farms and the entire food supply chain, the surveillance systems and the new CO² taxes helped epically in the whole acquisition. No way anyone would think like that and be able to execute?
