With apologies to the good chart-addicted people at TOD and to all their highly-paid think-this-thing-to-death counterparts at RAND and other think tanks, arguing about what systematic fixes to deploy  just now (and in the future) is very likely a lost cause at this point.

Awhile back, a friend at work asked me what could be accomplished if, say, the rulers of the world were to decree some fairly extreme changes in the way we do things here on our little blue planet. I forget the exact example she used, but it was something on the order of keeping all wintertime thermostats set no higher than 62F or banning non-essential vehicle travel or everyone dropping coal and using sustainable alternatives instead. (she is a big Friedman fan, if that says anything) My answer was that such thinking has already supposed a number of things that don’t currently exist: that any such edicts could be enforced universally enough to make a difference; that the powers-that-be possess the means to adequately communicate these things to people; that people will universally agree that such-and-such is a good idea and that everyone should do it; and that such things are even feasible at that scale – or any other.

Thanks to what I can only call the mentally corrosive effect of living in the Apollo era (which we’re still in, sadly, judging by that quote of Julie Payette’s that Patz posted in the previous thread , and which has morphed into an era which is not just information-rich but grotesquely oversaturated with information) we’re currently saddled with certain historically odd notions and points of view:

  • awarenesses of (and obsessions about) trivial faraway events of all types;
  • the notion that folks in village A can in any way affect events in distant village B;
  • a sense that there exist the unlimited means to implement things systematically;
  • a sense that everything everywhere matters somehow, that each of us is important or unique;

It was not just the raw technical progress of the past century and a half that was fueled by the black gold and its close cousins; these same very potent energies were also behind the way the new technologies of the era were able to be spread rapidly from inventions in one place to mass production of the same thing in many places just a decade or less later. The trend has been toward ever-faster rolling-out of new things in many more places. In one of his books (Marooned in Realtime) Vernor Vinge covered this subject rather nicely when he spoke of what he called the approaching singularity ~ when things would become obsolete oh so much faster than they are even today.

On more websites than I would care to name, one can find plenty of impassioned discussion on the “recipes for sustainable community” that we could design now and roll out over the coming years. News flash, people: top-down command economies are as bad an idea now – and are every bit as fundamentally unworkable now – as they were when the old Soviet Union thing first gained traction. And if some bloggers at the TOD think tank (or our old pal Ryan Crocker from “A Lifeboat Called Utopia”, or Amory Lovins, or the RAND people) imagine that their pet schemes for putting up enormous wind-turbine farms outside each town, biomass heat energy plants for each town, etc, can be implemented as easily as broadcasting the nightly lotto results (now in HDTV) to every glowing screen in Kansas or Missouri or Nebraska, they’ve proved in spades that they’ve fallen victim to the delusions of the times as enumerated above. If you must encounter folks like that, just smile, nod, and back away politely.

People have asked me what I’d do if they put me in charge of [whatever]. That’s so the wrong question. None of us are potentates, and even the official potentate hasn’t got enough guns, thugs, bribe money, or empty prison cells needed to enforce edicts like the ones mentioned above in the second paragraph. Sorry, there is no waving of the sparkly wand that results in hundreds of millions of westerners leaving their cars at home and walking to work the next day, or results in all the inefficient structures being torn down and replaced with passive-solar / masonry-chimney heated earth-bermed, cob, or straw bale houses.

No, the correct question to ask to someone is what they’ve done that’s worked out for them, or what they’re thinking about doing that they could actually do and might actually work. Not all of us will have the same answers, but that’s OK because we all live in different places and under different circumstances and conditions. We’re all as unique and different as flakes of snow, blades of grass, or grains of sand. Get used to this, please.

The city of Fitchburg could put the Nashua river to fantastic use for water power .. I think it drops at least a hundred feet within the city proper. Ditto for Schenectady and the Mohawk River. But will these cities do these things? Can they afford to do these things? Perhaps not.

What I did for transportation during this part of TLE would not work for everyone: the only reason I can get away with using such a minimal vehicle (for the UPL anyway) is that I’m single and live very close to work .. and if the weather is really horrible, I can usually find someone to give me a lift instead. Does this mean I think everyone should get the same kind of car? Heck no .. and I think it’s already been shown elsewhere that just the energy needed to roll out a 120M-sized fleet of those would take up many /years/ of our country’s oil use.

What GB or FAR have done for gardening does not work out for people who’ve got no access to open space or who live in places where the natural environment cannot support that type of growth. The same sort of gardens wouldn’t quite work right in the hot sandy dustbowls of Phoenix or Vegas without a lot more rainfall than comes down naturally. Ditto for the arid Rocky Mountains area or the former prairie.

For all I know, the city of Fitchburg could get more use out of that water power by using it to run a nifty mechanical irrigation system that allows them to do terrace farming there, instead of using it to run a handful of electric buses or power the flatscreens at night so people can check the Powerball results or watch “I Love Lucy” reruns. But will they do this? That’s up to them. For all I can tell, Fitchburg might well be as burned out and useless as Detroit within a dozen years.

There are no “solutions” to roll out en masse in the same way radio, powered flight, automobiles, television, penicillin, and nuclear weapons were rolled out in the previous century. When the time comes, your solutions will be what you and your neighbors think up on your own, what you can do with your own hands and with the materials around you, and what suit your own needs. Arguing about universal technical solutions, the way that dolt Friedman covers them in his books, is as laughable as pretending to be king of the universe – it is just a passing delusion of the times.

Until we get past this hump, individually and collectively, the so-called Doomer community is engaged in so much navel-gazing and little else.

[many thanks to the people who've left such excellent comments here on prior threads .. you guys/gals are great :) ]