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Until everyone understand and addresses continued growth in a finite environment --- which is a huge paradigm shift for all of us. Efficiency will not matter; technology will not matter; urgency will not matter; and there will be no technology to fix this future. This is the fundamental essential truth that no one likes to talk about – including your article.
Spot on, iclimbrock. Unfortunately, HO appears (from this post) to be unable to envisage a world that isn't largely the same as it is now, so some alternative to oil and natural gas must naturally be found. We need to deal with the reality that this is a finite world. And we need to deal with it very soon. Posts like this do a disservice because they include an implicit assumption of a solution (allowing business as usual); we just have to figure it out. It ain't so.
Could not of said it better myself---
Until we come up with a new relationship to the means of production, this expansion of growth in a finite environment will continue.
To come right to the point: Capitalism goes, or we go. We are a incredibly imaginative species, we can come up with a solution (possibly). The problem is we have evolved survival skills that no longer apply to the world we currently inhabit.
I don’t believe capitalism is necessarily the problem --- the pursuit of individual interest often produces a collective good for society and decentralized control and the freedom of choice is extremely motivating and efficient. But we must re-learn that it's to our individual best interest, society’s best interest, and that of our children’s best interest, to no over populate, over produce, or pollute our environment. There have many social moments in history where groups of people have earned their rights -- the abolishment of slavery, women’s right to vote, etc. Now we need a new social movement – the rights of the young and future generations (and many poor people all around the world) – to live in a clean, productive, and sustainable world and to have the same opportunities of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I can imagine a society that has a higher standard of living than the average person in the world has today and that is sustainable; but it has a lot smaller population and somehow we have to get from here to there in the next 100 years.
But this just isn't a problem in the next several centuries. World energy production is less than 1/1000th the solar flux.