Well, I’m still a closet doomer at heart but am content (to a certain degree) with the status quo.
Last week, my wife and I went to Las Vegas. Talk about a way of life that is unsustainable. It truly is a patch of desert that has been brought to life with the help of cheap fossil fuels and the highly stressed Lake Mead (Colorado River) water supply. Jim Kunstler is right that the Sunbelt (Southwest U.S.) will soon be in big trouble!
So, I just took one flight and over the course of the trip earned six additional free round-trip plane tickets. I hope AirTran can stay in business long enough so we can use them! When you pair all of this flying (my wife just went to Minnesota) with the fact that we own a big SUV and want to soon buy a hot tub, I question my own commitment to ‘living green,’ or at least preparing for the peak oil crisis I believe to be imminent. I really don’t like the idea of unnecessarily consuming anything, especially precious jet fuel, but on the other hand, traveling around the world and ‘living it up’ while I still can still does have a certain appeal to it!
I would like to ‘do’ more in terms of preparation, but I’m not even sure where to start. Interestingly, a non-peak oil book that I just reread yesterday had serious peak oil implications for me. I just read Our Iceberg Is Melting by John Kotter. 
It’s a fable about a colony of penguins who were enjoying life as they know it until one penguin, Fred, discovered that their iceberg was melting and in danger of breaking apart. This book goes through the process of doubt, skepticsm, and denial that many experience, and more importantly the process of how to communication the real problem effectively to come to a solution.
At a national and even local level, we are back to ‘denial mode’ as gasoline is less than $3.50/gallon. I’m afraid that in the short to medium term (less than five years) we are going to see a major collapse cause by our floundering economy and a peak oil energy crisis. A part of me prefers ‘denial mode,’ but in the back of my mind I feel that I need to be like Fred the Penguin and get the word out about Peak Oil so that preparations can be made and solutions can be found. I guess I’ll find out soon enough if the book had any lasting impact on me…
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