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jrtomhttp://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2007/02/the_agenda_rest.html
I'm not really sure how pressing a problem this is. Like a lot of people, I have a job (and a professional background) that puts me in a rather bad way if it turns out that Life As We Know It is going to become considerably more decentralized and energy-poorer...so I may not think about it as much as I should.
Should this all go badly quickly, I will be able to serve as a particularly good (bad) example of why intelligence and forethought are not a substitute for actual preparation. *wry smile*
I'd certainly like to encourage better public transit and less use of cars. Sadly, while there are a few different light rail projects being proposed for the Seattle area, none of them would come anywhere near where we live.
(Side note: yes, there are a lot of wingnuts responding to the original post. I don't necessarily agree with all of his suggested courses of action, either. Regardless, it's good to think about these sorts of things at least occasionally anyway, and to consider what changes of course would at least bring us more in line with those courses of action, even if I'm not presently willing to drop everything and become a peanut farmer in Pasco or something.)
I'm not really sure how pressing a problem this is. Like a lot of people, I have a job (and a professional background) that puts me in a rather bad way if it turns out that Life As We Know It is going to become considerably more decentralized and energy-poorer...so I may not think about it as much as I should.
Should this all go badly quickly, I will be able to serve as a particularly good (bad) example of why intelligence and forethought are not a substitute for actual preparation. *wry smile*
I'd certainly like to encourage better public transit and less use of cars. Sadly, while there are a few different light rail projects being proposed for the Seattle area, none of them would come anywhere near where we live.
(Side note: yes, there are a lot of wingnuts responding to the original post. I don't necessarily agree with all of his suggested courses of action, either. Regardless, it's good to think about these sorts of things at least occasionally anyway, and to consider what changes of course would at least bring us more in line with those courses of action, even if I'm not presently willing to drop everything and become a peanut farmer in Pasco or something.)
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Re: "oh shit, there goes the planet."
Date: 25 February 2007 08:15 (UTC)Absolutely. Nuclear power is going to be, at best, a buffer to ease the transition to an all-solar economy. At worst, people will think it's a panacea and use it to ignore truly sustainable solutions -- but given the waste issue, I doubt that will come to pass. The sun is the only source of energy which is truly sustainable over timescales longer than a few hundred years.
I'm not sure that we need to accept a ceiling on our standard of living, exactly. We may need to redefine, in popular culture, what makes for a good standard of living, though.
Actually, yeah, that's a better way of putting it. We need a new metric and that metric needs to consider things other than GDP. It needs to consider the environment and the health and psychological well-being of the populace. But, and here's the trouble, it needs somehow to be numerically measurable, because economists are going to want to optimize for it, to manage its risk, etc. So we need to be able to put some kind of dollar value on public spaces, clean air, well-educated children, etc., even though our sensibilities as human beings may go against it.
Raising the standard of living seems, in time, to lower the birth rate. The question is whether it does it fast enough, of course. *wry smile*
Dude, none of this is going to go nearly fast enough. But another question I have, and I don't really have a solid answer, is whether there is any causation behind that correlation: Why is it that, upon raising the standard of living in a country, the birth rate goes down? hypothetically?