Though well meaning, I think the idea of turning large chunks of Golden Gate Park, or NYC's Central Park, or LA's Griffith Park, into large community gardens to supplement the loss of imported food due to looming oil shortages is naive in the extreme. The huge populations in these three cities could never be supported by such means. Even if you train people to lower their consumption -- most Americans, myself included, are at least a bit overweight -- these dream community gardens won't cut it.

Two things will save us. As consumers, we lower our consumption. As a society, we start immediate funding (to the tune of hundreds of billions a year) into research for more efficient solar panels and batteries. Imagine a solar panel that can produce enough electricity to run a house on a cloudy day. Or a battery the size of a nickel that can run a skyscraper for a month. Impossible? So were a lot of things, once upon a time. But this sort of dreaming, I believe, will help us more than the dream of community gardens in every metropolis. Not that I'm against gardening.

More than likely if the US in fact becomes a poorer place then it will look like the poor countries we see today and not some camo draped apocalyptic wet dream. We'll live like Egypt or Iran where most people don't own cars or large home appliances and where electricity is rationed in many places. Social services will degrade but won't disappear and as always there will be a slice of upper middle class to wealthy people who are largely unaffected. If you can't afford a washing machine then you will certainly be able to afford someone to wash your clothes by hand in a tub, for example.

And if this means that plastic surgery, Caribbean cruises and flat screen tvs in your car are a thing of the past, then is that really the end of everything? Does that mean that you won't get that open heart surgery at age 80? Do you really need 14 different prescriptions you can't afford today anyway?

There are many ways to make liquid fuel from readily available raw materials. The common denominator is electricity. Fischer-Tropsch can make coal into CO and H2. These raw materials can be upgraded into long chain hydrocarbons. With lots of nuclear energy we can have lots of gasoline. It will be pricey, but available. Coal can also made into calcium carbide in an electric furnace. When calcium carbide reacts with water it makes acetylene. Acetylene, which has a triply unsaturated bond between the two carbons is easily polymerized into long chain hydrocarbons. So all you doomsayers are, as usual, full of it. We will have (pricey) liquid fuel for several more generations. at least. Germany was able to run its WW2 war machine on synthetic gasoline. Under far more benign circumstances we can do at least as well. However, SUV's and recreational use of fuel will probably go away.

New Orleans is probably a good metaphor for how we're reatcing to Peak Oil. As with the hurricane, we knew it was coming for 30 years. Nobody could imagine the destruction it was going to bring except for a handful who were dismissed as looneys. In the days leading up to the hurricane, we ould freaking track it from space! Yet we still didn't get our asses in gear. Sucker hit and it only took 48 hours for the New Orleans Superdome to turn into the Mad Max Thunderdome.

As a society that is spending $1,000 on oil and oil wars for every $1 being spent getting away from oil, how can anybody not see where the arc of our society's path is heading?

Best,

Matt

My good deed for the day was to ask my city councilman how we could stop wasting oil trimming lawns and hedges in my city.

There must be a furious amount of oil being poured into maintaining lawns and hedges across the country. That's the first thing we should be able to cut out. But it's harder than it seems.

I asked the owner of a landscape company why he didn't switch to hand trimming and hand mowers since energy prices were going up.

He said the problem is he'd need more workers to get all the jobs done on time, and the cost of worker's compensation insurance was too high.

I don't know if this guy was being honest, or whether he's just so wedded to his power mowers and leaf blowers that he's refusing to consider an alternative.

But obviously we're going to need an alternative so I think now is the time to start looking for one.

Even if the world doesn't stop and even if the Jeremiahs are wrong, the era of petroleum-dependent landscaping has got to be called to an end.

Global warming will do us in before oil shortages do. And besides, with enough money, you can burn coal cleanly. We do have a lot of coal left.

Let's say that I accept the premise of peak oil. So what does this mean as far as the prospects of a typical Salon reader and his or her children?

Bleak, perhaps, unless you find other white families for protection and survival. To be blunt.

I was frankly quite surprised that the article presented a kind of hippie-paradise post-apocalyptic vision, rather than the Katrina Superdome scenario.

As someone current studying nuclear engineering (which involves civil, materials and mechanical engineering) I do not see solar and wind as realistic alternatives to centralised power plants. Solar in particular can be a wonderful supplementary source of power in the domestic and commercial sectors, but is unsuitable for transportation and industry. The material and labour expenditures needed to replace even one traditional power plant with a solar station or wind farm of equal capacity are utterly mind boggling.

Can people really appreciate what would go into building an 800 sq km solar power array, which is the scale we would be talking about? The refined silicon and heavy metal requirements alone are staggering and not with out attendant environmental consequences. No project in human history is even remotely to this level in the time frame we would be discussing.

Nuclear plants are already the cheapest source of electricity in most countries (the US is an anomaly here) and procedural reforms will ensure that the legal wrangling of the 1970’s and 80’s is not repeated. Contrary to Alec Johnson’s claims on nuclear's viability being a myth, France already provides nearly 80% of her electricity from roughly 55 nuclear-driven plants and would not require “thousands of them”. A country of 60 million can be extrapolated in engineering terms to one of 300 million, even if we account for electricity being an increasingly important source of energy (replacing combustion eventually in most cases).

The fear the media has created towards nuclear energy does a tremendous disservice to our environment. I got into nuclear engineering because I am environmentalists (no car, organic everything and the like), not as an ex post facto self-justification. The risk of deaths due to nuclear accidents are utterly miniscule compared to routine industrial accidents and the potential impact of global warming.