Savinar has given public speeches about peak oil but he says he prefers to do his Paul Revere-ing virtually so he doesn’t have to see the look in people’s eyes when they get it. “This is like the worst news that people have ever heard, other than maybe a death in the family, because you’re basically finding out that your entire model of the world is based on bullshit,” he says. He does not relish being the bearer of bad news: “People who want the Hummer or the three-bedroom home, or they want their kid to go to college, and grow up to be an attorney or a doctor — all that, everything that they’ve based their lives on — you’re telling them that that’s all out the window.”
Critics debate the degree of doom to attach to peak oil, but Savinar is right: Scientists don’t deny it’s coming. The only question is when. Some geologists say we’re already on the downslope while others put the peak at around mid-century. Regardless, thousands of people of various professions aren’t waiting for the exact date of the bad news to be pinned down. They’ve seen the polemical documentary “The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream,” shown at countless house parties, community centers and city halls across the country. Or, maybe they’ve been frightened by truly alarmist Web sites, such as Die Off, that predict billions — yes, that’s right, billions — of deaths globally because of peak oil. Or they’ve read the Hirsch report, a paper commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy, in which professional energy analysts found that it would take at least a decade to prepare for peak oil, yet they don’t see their government exactly leaping into action.
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