GreyZone you have not fully internalized the fact that humans are NOT smarter than yeast.

When things are not going well, CARVE A BIGGER STONE HEAD.

GreyZone,

An increasing number of venture capitalists are making right decisions on energy. Look at A123Systems, Nanosolar, and other companies the VCs have funded.

Granted, it would help if governments made far better decisions. But even there I see hopeful signs.

The UK government has decided to do a big build on offshore wind and will probably announce a big nuclear power plant program shortly. The UK government also is looking at its coal reserves in hopes that will cushion the shock.

I suspect some governments have cottoned onto the problem with Peak Oil. But they are using Global Warming as their justification for policies that they want to do for other reasons. Again, I think the UK government thinks that the Russian natural gas can't reliably replace North Sea natural gas for example. Hence the big push in wind, nuclear, and coal.

Greyzone,

I think you're right, but, surely a central question is, what are the right decisions, how do we identify them and agree on how to proceed? How do we adapt and change, and what if the right decisions come up against the vested interests of powerful groups in society who are satisfied with the way things are, and are not particularly enamoured with the idea of change?

GZ, I think I have to agree.
The problems we have now are global, PO, GW and Economic. Solutions will not be global.

Our attempts at mitigation, start at national levels and continue down by state, corporation, large and small business, county and family. We have forgotten how to cooperate. We have reared our children to be individuals and selfish.

When decisions are made at the national level there will be division and dissent. This division and dissent continues down through the various levels of collectivism until you reach the individual.

We no longer have a need for territorial defence and cooperation, we rely of government security. We are not like schools of fish, penguins, ants or bees or even a herd of eland that work for the common good.

Technology alone can't save us because we are jealous. We will not make sacrifices because most will think they deserve more, are more entitled or just plain better than another ethnic group, country or person.

Hardships forced upon us are not sacrifices. We would, albeit reluctantly abandon luxuries, if we believed everyone was giving them up.
Everyone won't accept sacrifice and give up luxuries though, and it will give rise to the insidious black markets.
As life becomes even harder we will still be looking out for number one until......cooperation out of necessity, becomes an actual survival mechanism once more.

The very sad affair is that we are enslaved by the compulsion to over consume. If we stop investing, using services and buying the myriad of fashionable items ranging from clothing, electronics, travel and personal transport, we doom the economy and our way of life anyway

Do we as humans have the ability to initiate, implement and seriously enforce hard decisions for the common good?
Is cooperation still a possibility?
Are our religious beliefs a help or hindrance?

Greyzone,

As Kunstler is wont to tell us technology and energy are not the same thing. And I would argue that the Roman empire did not callapse at all and is still with us today. It is now more diffuse and it's influence more subtle, but we still have institutions i.e the Roman Catholic Church that can trace their roots to the Caesars. No one in AD 400 set out to continue the empire as it once stood, but the collective memory persisted and influenced the decisions of many individuals as they adpated to a new world order.

The same goes for the British Empire. I's heyday is long gone, but the dominace of the English language ensures that it's influence will persist in the same proportion as it dominated the world.

The American empire too will fall, but that won't diminish the influence of Americanism. The broken, the corruption, the greed, the gun culture and the avarice will be swept away as the energy for which the system was built to channel, eventually depletes.

But the American founding principal of freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, a sense of duty to God and a pioneering and enterprising spirit are the enduring influences that will persist into history.

Unfortunately though, there is nothing that can save the empire as it stands. The only decisions we absolutely have to get right are the ones that avoid all out nuclear war. Every other mistake on the descent can and will be corrected eventually and attenuated by the enduring influences of empires passed.

Do you think that Rome was unable to alter its course? Of course it could have but it did not.

This is very contentious, you know. A good argument can be made that the Romans could NOT alter their course. Rome was a complicated balancing act: an extremely rapacious Senatorial class, an Emperor who might be able to restrain them from self-destructive excess perhaps temporarily if that, an army with its own complex dynamics, a number of powerful external enemies ... so yeah, maybe they sometimes had the choice to swim a couple of yards left or a couple of yards right, but they could not swim upstream, and eventually they went over the falls, as they were bound to do.

A common theme on this site is that we 'should have' made certain decisions thirty years ago. But that was never going to happen given our economic and political system of the time. We couldn't have made those decisions, so it is no surprise we did not. Now we will be forced to make those decisions. Is it too late? Who knows.

Path dependence. Human beings are smarter than yeast, but sometimes don't get much more in the way of choice.