The Oil Drum: Local

My explanation was pointed out towards myself, I have not expected you to know my points. Maybe I was frustrated a bit, but I also had the point of going outside of the framework you probably unwillingly created with your initial post. I am sorry I have to poke it out - but if you return to it and reread it objectively, you did not create a platform for unbiased discussion, but rather tried to enforce your assumptions and wanted us to discuss on that background.

In my posts I tried to challange your assumptions, and of course this looked "distructive" for all people sharing them. I'm sorry but if we are going to discuss, first I need to know that we are on an even ground.

Regarding your point - I've thought about that too. It is beyond doubt that we can try and maybe succeed to patch things for quite a while. Probably by massive investments in wind mills and solar panels, by down-sizing and using more efficiently the energy we have, we could be able to meet both ends for a couple of decades (give or take) of declining fossil fuels.

In this 2 decades though, we will have to pray (and pray very hard) that somebody will finally come up with some breakthrough that will make renewable energy scalable enough, or with some other energy source that is better and less enviromentally destructive than the choices we have today.

I can not predict the future - we may or may not reach this breakthrough. Several points though:

First it is much more likely to happen if we are not in an emergency situation, and we live a little bit at large. Already resources are being redirected from research for the future to maintaining the status quo - a shining example - renewable energy funding now goes for maintaining our presence in Iraq. If we go for tightening the belts the same will start happenin on ever larger scale.

Second, even if someone in 20 years discovers room-temperature radiation-free cold fusion, there is a great chance that we will not have be able to build it, because all our efforts and resources will be directed at keeping up with our current needs.

And third if we don't reach this breaktrough this would mean that Olduvai was right and we will start descending with unpredictable consequences. Having a certain  opinion about the nature of Homo Sapiens though I don't expect it to lead to anything positive... there are simply too many of us and I see us burning every bit of carbon, cutting every tree (and every neighbour's throat we can reach) on the way down. I don't want this to happen.

Of course I could be wrong with the timing. It is possible that it is too early (or too late?) for making this choice but... here I have to rely on my gut feeling which tells me it is never too early.