patrick.net

I'm suprised this hasn't generated more discussion. Anyone taken a look at that link? The author fully accepts human-caused global warming and does some basic calculations to determine if it's physically possible to stop using fossil fuels while maintaining our standard of living.

The world is not getting off fossil fuels and doesn't need to.
The USA has an ocean of natural gas under it and it can run all cars and trucks here for 200 years or so.
If they find a way to harvest the deep sea methane hydrates, our fuel supply will be another thousand years or so.
Whether humans cause warming is irrelevant, since the sun's energy varies so much we are likely to freeze to death anyway in another mini ice age. This was a scare in the 70's, the "norther hemisphere cooling" caused southern hemisphere droughts and bad grain harvests in argentina,australia, etc.
Buring natural gas and methane hydrates (someday) produces less CO2 anyway because of the chemical structure of methane compared to gasoline or coal.
What is the ideal temperature of the earth? What year was the ideal temperature?

Well that's a whole different argument. My point is to show how much of a challenge it will be to completely stop using fossil fuels IF we decide to do so.

How hard could it be? We just get 50% of Americans to stop using electricity, which is how much is generated by burning coal.
We will never "decide" to do any such thing of course.
I have lived in England and been around in Europe. They have no energy and this is one of the several reasons that Europe is essentially poor, but they do have a decent standard of living because of their welfare state. No one really starves in France or Spain.
Outside of London, most of England was quaint and the people mostly were broke. Bed and breakfast is when you have no money, no job and have a house so you rent out a room to strangers.

True. It would be very difficult. Maybe even impossible. At least with current technology.

I didn't start this thread to imply it would be easy to get off fossil fuels. Quite the contrary.

There are too many people that think it would be an easy thing to do, and think the only reason we don't is because of evil fill-in-the-blank.

I don't think we CAN "get off fossil fuels".

Could we reduce our use by 50% or more? Easily.

What we need:
1) Living closer to where you work
2) Housing targeted towards efficiency & livability
3) End of the 3,000 mile Caesar salad
4) Urban design for people & neighborhoods not for cars.

All those would go a long way WITHOUT techno-miracles

Here's a great TED Talk with Kunstler about suburbia:

http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia.html

I watched it twice. I find myself seeing "Nature bandaids" everywhere now.

CaptainShuddup says

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A Plan

Really??? A dislike?

I don't know why that surprises me, if there's one thing Liberals just LOATHE is a well thought out plan.