Tuesday June 03, 2008

Peakoiler website peakoil.com swamped after Peak Oil article posted on over 200 mainstream news sites

green.yahoo.com -> peakoil.com (thread) :

Convinced the planet's oil supply is dwindling and the world's economies are heading for a crash, some people around the country are moving onto homesteads, learning to live off their land, conserving fuel and, in some cases, stocking up on guns they expect to use to defend themselves and their supplies from desperate crowds of people who didn't prepare. These energy survivalists are not leading some sort of green revolution meant to save the planet. Many of them believe it is too late for that, seeing signs in soaring fuel and food prices and a faltering U.S. economy, and are largely focused on saving themselves.

These survivalists believe in "peak oil," the idea that world oil production is set to hit a high point and then decline. Scientists who support idea say the amount of oil produced in the world each year has already or will soon begin a downward slide, even amid increased demand. But many scientists say such a scenario will be avoided as other sources of energy come in to fill the void. On the PeakOil.com Web site, where upward of 800 people gathered on recent evenings, believers engage in a debate about what kind of world awaits. Some members argue there will be no financial crash, but a slow slide into harder times. Some believe the federal government will respond to the loss of energy security with a clampdown on personal freedoms. Others simply don't trust that the government can maintain basic services in the face of an energy crisis. The powers that be, they've determined, will be largely powerless to stop what is to come.

- The charts above show the explosion in traffic as hundreds of mainstream news websites picked up the story off the AP newswires, and tens of thousands of new visitors swamped the website. The MySQL database had to be shut down a few times, and it has since been revealed that the site had become CPU- and memory-limited, instead of bandwidth-limited as some might have expected. From a technical point of view, it is quite understandable since most of the pages on the site are dynamically generated via PHP scripting.

If not for the story breaking over the Memorial Day weekend, the traffic load could have been even higher, though I did point out that the Internet audience is global and people outside the US don't really celebrate that day. The traffic has since stabilized quite a bit in the days since. Being a long-time peakoil.com member, it was fascinating for me to watch as new members signed up and began going through the same processes that many of us old hands had gone through ourselves. Some questioned the Peak Oil thesis, others talked about technological solutions, and a few brought up one of the all-time favourites of the cornucopians, the abiotic oil theory. I did my part by (re-)introducing the doomerosity scale, a sliding level of 1 to 10 where 1 meant you were a "there is no problem" cornucopian (or economist) and 10 meant you were an all-out "the world is ending" doomer.

As I remarked, it took $130+ oil to have something finally click in the collective consciousness of humankind, with reverberations being felt throughout the social and political fabric. NYMEX crude oil prices have come off the $135.09 high and are at the time of writing consolidating around the $126-128 range. But the peakoilers continue to observe, we continue to discuss our fate, and we continue to make preparations for the future. Resistance levels are at $150, $180, $200, and over $300, while support levels are at $120, $110, $100 and $90. And like I always say, don't really count on the last 2 or 3.

(2008-06-03 13:09:45 SGT) [Energy] Permalink Comments [1]

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