Originally posted by ihasa If we fail to develop green - or should that be sustainable - industry, we'll just miss out to China who will ultimately gain the economic (and moral) upper hand.
Continuing to base our economies on the assumption that cheap oil will always be available is a folly, as would be postponing the switch to alternative technologies until our competitors are way ahead of us, or until our traditional fossil fuel technologies are collapsing due to problems to do with oil supply.
Even if you put climate change issues aside (and they're probably valid concerns) the case for putting money into new technologies NOW rather than wait until we ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO is very strong.
Yep. And the fact is, waiting till we've burned all the readily-available oil or turned it into plastic containers is something that will leave us without some of the most-useful stuff in the Earth for all the other purposes, some of which might turn out to be essential to whatever solutions we come up with.
One thing nobody seems to want to hear in America is that a real key aspect to any of this is to actually *organize our civilization better.* The good news is a lot of our energy consumption isn't actually *making life better,* just wasting. In fact, a lot of it's actually both a pain in the arse, (Like the daily colossal waste of energy involved in commuting in big personal cars, not to mention having to drive through suburban sprawl just to get to a grocery store or whatever) personal expenses going out the window, and in general things which make us unhealthy and frequently just overweight, out of touch, and out of shape.
In fact, a lot of the maladies and malaises of modern life can really be attributed to to so much having been *built* around the profit and influence of a very few, right down to the laments about 'Not enough time for family,' ...All things that the same profit-making few want each individual to take on themselves while trying to win at the contradictions of working longer in cubicles, commuting further to have decent schools and safety cause 'livable cities' somehow isn't a word that excites people as it should, they built huge tracts of suburban sprawl with no village centers, or strangled extant ones with the big-box phenomenon (Big box stores don't have to be inherently awful, but they get way too many advantages over local business and just feed on communities, without even usually helping out with public transportation. )
Basically, people seem to be in the habit of thinking in terms of dismembered objects, issues, piecemeal 'solutions' when the real problems are about *systems.*
The problem isn't any one thing, and contrary to what the fossil fuel and nuclear industries have been saying on the energy part, the solution won't be all in one thing. Waiting on some magic bullet while consumption just keeps rising and proliferating just isn't a winning equation.
For all that things seem intractable, bear in mind that we *do* have enough parts to make things work a whole lot better. Perhaps that's why the corporate influence is getting so heavy-handed.
Combining the old and new is kind of the key. Some things we left behind cause we didn't know how to *use* them. (Or because in many ways they actually sucked. Small farms and towns like that are great, but especially when they're regressive and isolating, a lot of people would want to *leave,* of course, limited opportunities, everyone up in your business all the time and precious little to do if you weren't of a certain bent. Well, now we have the world at our keyboards, you could even telecommute. There's a ton of ways to arrange things around *people,* not money and consumption.
Most of our energy consumption is in fact *wasted:* much of it's in inefficient housing, for instance, and that'd be a great use for a big but sagging home improvement sector. Parts.
Systems.