[Graeme]

The alt fuels distraction

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n the next 50 years, give or take, those of us in the United States will face two challenges. We must wean ourselves off of oil and we must cut our carbon-dioxide emissions by around 60 percent. Either would be difficult in isolation; together, well ... imagine patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time, only with trillions of dollars and millions of lives at stake. And with one arm tied behind your back.

What's the best way to meet these challenges? If you were the proverbial Martian, visiting our planet to dispassionately assess our options, what would you find most promising?

And if our Martian wanted to get a little bit more ambitious, he might emphasize these broader policy and technological initiatives:

• Quit subsidizing fossil-fuel industries. Period.

• Impose a gas or carbon tax. It would put uniform pressure on the market to reduce oil consumption, without favoring any particular alternative. (The impact on low-income Americans could be offset with reduced payroll taxes.)

• Encourage density by reversing land-use policies at all levels of government that subsidize road-building and sprawl at the expense of compact, walkable, mixed-use communities served by effective public transportation.

• Drop perverse agricultural subsidies that overwhelmingly favor petro-heavy industrial agriculture and long-distance food transport at the expense of organic farms and local food systems.

• Scrap electricity-market regulations that virtually mandate centralized power production at large, inefficient plants (by some estimates, up to two-thirds of energy is wasted en route to end users); instead, encourage decentralized production from small-scale, site-appropriate sources.

[grabby]

Additional needs:
50 MPH speed limit
LEFT LANE MUST BE CARPOOL
Special license to drive a vehicle over 2000 pounds.
Tax all food grains prodcucts for consumption coming into usa 100%
200% tax on anything from over seas

[gego]

Maybe we should try freedom for a change.

Reduce government everywhere to 3% of what it is now and take the government completely out of the economy except to punish fraud and theft.

No subsidies to businesses or individuals. Small per person tax equal for everyone regardless of income (that sure would keep it low since the greatest tax must be affordable to the poorest). Remove all government licensing (granting of monopolies).

The result would be that people would be forced to come up with solutions, if there are any; given the history of the world, that is the only thing that has ever advanced the condition of mankind (who do you think discovered oil to begin with, individuals or government, and who did almost all the inventing?).

If you think that government imposed solutions stand much of a chance then you are dead wrong, with the emphasis on dead.

My own view is that there is not a solution other than severe population reduction (6.5 billion to less than 1 billion) and a substantial reduction in the average standard of living for the survivors. Fortunately government will collapse also, so individuals will be forced to find their individual solutions.

I think that those of you who think that suggestions such as listed in this thread are appropriate, substantially underestimate the severity of the decline ahead. The listed solutions are not even the equivalent of putting a band-aid on a deadly tumor. Maybe this is just the way the human mind deals with the unthinkable.

[grabby]

That would bring on the collapse as soon as possible. The prior two posts would delay the collapse as long as possible.

just sooner or later, slow or fast.