Well, this is all very nice, but these environmental stooges trying to make a difference locally are just as deluded as the Y2Kers...you just can't WAIT for modern society to come to a screeching halt soon enough. But as history suggests, they will be just as disappointed as their Y2K bretheren when everyone suddenly embraces cold fusion technology, or some other technological invention that (sort-of) fixes one problem while creating new ones we never had before. And if that doesn't happen, don't be surprised if nuclear power (that's pronounced nu-cular in these here parts) becomes popular again when faced with the growing demand for power.

In fact, this whole article, however well-written, basically doesn't even consider the possibility that technology will EVENTUALLY solve our problems...sure, the highways might end up like in those Mad Max movies, but mankind is a lot more resilient than these doomsayers want to believe.

But again, most of the individual interviews for this story are coming from a state that hasn't built a new power plant in 20+ years, where many residents don't HAVE to rely on vehicular transportation to get around, like people in the "middle" part of the country do...In fact, I bet they probably think they're superior to the rest of the U.S. for figuring this whole thing out while everyone else just keeps trucking on that Road to Hell, la-li-la-li-la...Look at me, I'm special, I'm smart, I've got it all figured out while I hide in my basement with my K-rations and birchstocks (or whatever the fuck you call those clothes)...la-li-la...I can grow enough food for myself and my pet chihuahua with the allergy to ragweed and peanut butter. Whenever I hear of urban-type folk talking about being self-sufficient and growing there own food, I always think about that scene in Easy Rider, when Billy the Kid and Cpt. America go to the hippy commune and see those poor, starving college-dropout kids trying to grow crops in the middle of the fucking desert...without a prayer of being successful..

And by the way Rob...

Quote"Oh and Pissed-Off Brit? I'm a patriot, so please suck my cock.

-- Rob Anderson"

No, no, see, you got it all wrong...you have to say "Lop mah ballz, okaey?"...like Tony Montana from Scarface...that's how a true nation of immigrants tells a British La-ti-da to go to hell.

We have a nice conversation about how the peak oil issue involves near-infinite variables and all hard-and-fast predictions ought to be taken with more than a few grains of salt, and then what ends up quoted is my flippant comment about starvation… Well, O.K., so these things go. But let’s please stop putting people into boxes in this discussion. It is not the “doomsayers” vs. the “cornucopians.” Most of the people I know who think and worry about peak oil have a very nuanced view of the issue indeed. A motley crew in the extreme, with a wide variety of convictions, areas of expertise, preconceptions, suspicions, and hopes for the future.

Personally, I don’t think industrial society is going to end tomorrow. I do think it likely that industrial society as we know it will come to an end sooner or later. But which of the many ecological and resource crises will get us, in what combination, and when – these are all questions that are still very much up in the air. I think that peak oil will play a role, that we cannot rely on market mechanisms and miracle technologies to save/alert us in time, that a good amount of economic hardship will be entailed, and that preparation for a range of scenarios needs to begin now. For me, it’s less about apocalypse in x number of years than about the futility of persisting in our current endeavor of perpetual economic growth within a finite ecological system. To a degree, that outlook is the product of my own prejudices and intuition (we live on a sphere, no?), but it’s also the result of looking carefully at the various alternatives tossed about and concluding that none is perfect, few are scalable, and fewer still are attractive from a net-energy standpoint.

In a world facing a number of interconnected crises, we cannot afford to ignore factors like energy returned on energy invested (EROEI). Sure, we’ve got the Canadian tar sands to mine and the Fischer-Tropsch process magically turning abundant American coal into oil. But in a world simultaneously dealing with climate change – in which we must begin to scale back the absolute amount of fossil fuels that we use/burn – we simply cannot afford to switch to a fuel that entails burning an additional unit of energy for every two seen by the end-user. Sure, nuclear plants are capable of providing a huge amount of power, but they’ve also got long lead times and are damn expensive to build, particularly if you take decommissioning into account. We don’t have a crash program for this, nor do we have a vehicle fleet capable of using that boundless energy for transportation purposes. And ethanol? Sure, that sounds like a good thing too – carbon neutral, doesn’t entail the sort of massive infrastructural overhaul that the “hydrogen economy” would, Brazil’s got that nifty program going, and Archer Daniels Midland’s all for it. But in a world where desertification is increasing, topsoil is eroding, and per-capita food production has been falling for years, it is tragic and foolish to further link the price of food products to the price of transportation fuel. And, yes, sugar is at a 24-year high, due at least in part to Brazil’s nifty program, while in Southeast Asia Europe’s appetite for palm oil-based biofuels is the leading cause of deforestation. In the U.S., soil fertility and falling aquifers are not incidental, but crucial considerations that are largely ignored in discussions about large-scale biofuels production. The only “waste” that exists in this system is that which we produce ourselves, though even that was taken from somewhere. The only “extra” is that which we haul out of the ground.

So something’s gotta give. I think that in the end the hard-core “doomers” will be surprised by the degree to which humans are complicated and ingenious, while the “cornucopians” and “techno-optimists” will be even more surprised by the degree to which those same humans are constrained by physical reality. In the meantime, those two camps need to talk and listen to each other more, while the issue as a whole needs to be placed front and center in the public debate.