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159 comments on Revisiting the Olduvai Theory

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Leanan on March 7, 2006 - 3:43pm

Exactly. I suspect most people have no clue how much energy goes into building and maintaining our infrastructure. Even if a handful of wealthy people can afford electric cars, what are they going to drive them on? Will people who can't afford cars be willing to pay taxes for highways so Bill Gates can keep driving his hydrogen limo?

We are going to be hard-pressed to maintain our current infrastructure, let alone build all new, as would be required for hydrogen, coal gasification, nuclear, etc.

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mshortridge on March 8, 2006 - 11:21am

Will the highways last longer when noone is driving on them? Ha-Ha.
As I drive past endless tracts of suburbia all roofed with asphalt shingles, I wonder about that little detail as a weak link among many weak links in our chain of infrastructure. Once a roof starts leaking, it is a quick trip to decay of the building. When 100 million roofs made to last 15 years all start to break down and leak just at a time when the building trades have run out of gas and material to repair them, those miles and miles of homes are all going to start to implode in slow-mo.
-Matt, former residential carpenter turned high school teacher, DC burbs

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“This order [i.e. capitalism] is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with the economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.”

—Max Weber, 1905