What is going to amuse our bouches now?
This would be interesting to contribute to, but the tone of some of the comments is frustrating. There’s some hand-wringing about “why didn’t we switch away from fossil fuels in the late 60s?” I reply to that with, did you? There’s a weird vibe of “I want to be independent and unique but I want everyone to do it my way.”
So the economics, the USA-centric stuff is the kind of stuff that keeps the wingnutosphere in material. But the larger scale comment is interesting. My favorite quote: lifestyles of the rich and famous doesn’t scale. But the reality is that lifestyles of the middle-class, as we define it here in the US, doesn’t either. 2000+ sq ft house on a large lot, 2 cars (or one per driver, whichever is greater), hot and cold running everything, this is all going to look like an aberration of the worst kind in years to come. Land is finite (except in the Netherlands) and the energy we use is finite, by definition — that’s why we refer to the other kind as sustainable. It means that what we’re doing isn’t.
It seems more and more likely that the only way out of this, in the short term, is some kind of space program for energy.
- Find a way to replace as many of the internal combustion power sources as possible with electric or hybrid power (either engineer drop-in replacements or buy back vehicles that meet certain criteria). I favor option a, as b would reward people who made poor choices in the first place.
- Get PV arrays on every flat, south-facing surface.
- Capture and store heat from the sun to heat the water we bathe and wash in.
- Re-regulate trucking and get rail working again. Replace short-haul air travel with train or green coach travel (hybrid buses that use electricity for freeway driving and switch to biodiesel on surface streets).
- Dismantle the byzantine farm subsidy arrangement (sugar subsidies that impoverish 3rd world farmers? paying farmers who can’t eat their corn, as it’s not food-grade) and do away with industrial farming with it’s excessive of petroleum inputs.
Add your own ideas below. I’m sure the business community would complain that all of this is too hard and unfair. Evidently, they don’t teach that what is a challenge to one is an opportunity to another. Seriously, this country put a man on the moon 2 years short of the challenge issues by JFK with technology we can’t imagine trying to use today. And this challenge, without the great unknowns of space travel, is <whine>too ha-a-a-a-r-d</whine>? Please.