Comment 30 by Helga Vierich :

It is true that the "voters" want jobs and cheap fuel. That is partly because they are completely ignorant about reality. And whose fault is that?

In all honesty, I'd say the voters must mainly take the blame. Why shouldn't they take on the responsibility of educating themselves?

Well, how many of you here on this site have ever taken Peak Oil seriously, or looked up some of the publications from members of the Post Carbon Institute? How many of you have ever taken the time to look at the writings or interviews of Colin Campbell? How many of you like to think, even today, that technology will find a way to allow our economic system to persist in giving us the standard of living we have? This is not a rhetorical question. I really want to know.

I have taken a look at peak oil, but not a very close look. There are only so many things you can worry about. One of the problems for the environmental movement is that they have cried wolf a bit too much and now people have got bored with the same old doom and gloom. In my youth, I was guilty of this crime - repeating, uncritically and without proper knowledge, the dramatic and prescient environmental disaster stories that I had read about from Greenpeace or whoever. Most never came to pass or have not done so yet. I am jaded, now, I'm sorry to say, and peak oil is just the most recent environmental scare story. I'm not saying there is no truth in it, and for economic reasons alone, let alone environmental, we should be getting off our oil addiction asap.

I suspect human population will continue to multiply at the expense of all other wildlife. There may come a point when we have so trashed the planet, that we will kill ourselves off, but I don't see that happening for a long while yet.

Politically, I agree with you, I see repression round the corner. We have already seen how the EU has replaced the Greek and Italian prime ministers without a mandate from the people, and in the UK and elsewhere, political and environmental activists are harrassed and entrapped by the police. Everywhere you look, governments are tooling up with surveillance equipment and personal recognition tracking techniques. Most people who care about this sort of thing believe that it will come through some sort of right wing coup. I believe, it will come from the left in the guise of socialism and big government. In the end, it makes little difference either way.