Book club participants’ take on ‘The Long Emergency’

Book club participants made astute observations about The Long Emergency and how reading the book affected their thoughts on oil dependence. A sampling from the blog:

Artie: It’s one thing to assume that technology will find clever replacements to heat and cool us, and for the internal combustion engine to transport all 6 billion of us to our individual daily destinations. But it’s quite another to imagine a replacement system for our present oil- and natural gas-based agriculture. In this respect, the agrarian practices of the 1800s will have enormous value to future generations, who will have to feed themselves without the incredible, portable power of gasoline and diesel to run tractors, tillers, threshers and the whole motor pool of modern agricultural equipment.


Ken: Remember, cheap fossil fuels were the bequest of hundreds of millions of years of geologic processes storing away the sun’s energy. (We’ve half exhausted this endowment in less than 100 years.) This did not happen overnight, and I’m not optimistic that any substitute will be commercialized at scale in the near future. But I hope I’m wrong.

Brad: The more widely I read, the more I lost faith that there was a coherent plan to intelligently deal with what we’re facing. I also believe that our political so-called leaders have zero faith that the citizenry will want to make hard choices; they’ll make them for us.

Dallas Morning News