a better way to put it would be a lack of dismissiveness) of your message? Based upon the information that was made available before this conference, how much do you think this might have been a factor in the acceptance (or perhaps a better way to put it would be a lack of dismissiveness [sic]) of your message? This would be hard to assess. I can only say that my impressions were formed more from the personal interactions and conversations rather than some kind of sampling of, say, Likert-scaled questions. Several of the people I talked with had prior knowledge of peak oil and its implications. Some didn't but seemed to quickly grasp the significance and accept the data. What really caught my attention is the degree to which they were willing to see the relation between net energy available for the economy (declining) and the effects we think this has had on the economy as a whole. That is the part that most impressed me since I've been used to the typical neoclassical economists arguing that energy (measured in dollars I suppose) is such a small part of the GDP that it couldn't have been the "cause" of the economic downturn. These business people and government analysts had no trouble seeing that turning down the energy input would turn down the work accomplished and hence create a disparity between real wealth generation and the phony wealth created from debt and treating bets as if they were real assets. As