Joe,

Frankly I don't think you get it either. What you are proposing is that if we piss around the edges, we can maintain business as usual (BAU). I would suggest it is BAU that has to go which gets into the areas of economic systems, governance and societal philosophies. To me, this is what GZ is suggesting with triage.

I've posted numerous times that I have lived in the boondocks for a long time since I left the chemical industry. I live in a different reality than urban and suburban people. I know this is the case because I've lived in both worlds including time near NYC and other large cities. I want to emphasize that this is a different reality. In fact, I've been working on a post I've tentatively titled "A Sense of Place and Your Future" because of the large numbers of negative responses to a post I made on Monday's DB. I've held off posting it since there have been a bazillion posts about the increased price of oil.

As someone noted down thread, most relocalization efforts are also pissing around the edges. GZ'z triage is coming and people will be either on the bus or off the bus. The ones who will most likely make it are those who have already come to grips with what will come down and made concrete changes yesterday or the year before. The laggards are doomed.

Todd

Peak Oil triage will be self selecting. In medicine the doctors do the selecting, but in the Post Peak Oil world individuals and coutries do their own triage selecting. The world just has to let it happen. That is the best thing to do and is the reason doctors do triage.

Haiti has decided to self destruct. So has Zimbabwe. Egypt subsidizes food for urban residents and imports it as well. Bangladesh: need I give more examples?

Individuals do the same thing all the time: drug users, cigarette smokers, over eaters like myself, and many others have evils and vices that self select the next to die.

Some Peak Oil aware also self select to die. They are called doomers. They reject mitigation with ethanol. They reject using the U.S.'s considerable resources to its own best advantage in the name of vague benefits that supposedly accrue to the starving in other countries or the environment. Some insist that conservation is the only solution which imposes even more stringent constraints on mitigation. In effect they are selecting death.

Others overgeneralize that the problems in some parts of the U.S. are true throughout the country. Regions that are trying to deal with the situation by rapidly developing wind energy or ethanol are dismissed as too small to mean anything in the big picture.

Maybe so, but for certain parts of the country it will mean survival. Locally, Winnebago Industries is practically shut down during its normally busiest time of the year. Corn is no longer exported. It goes to the ethanol plants. Giant wind turbines are being erected. My place will have about half a dozen a quarter mile across the fence. It is changing the whole feel of the countryside.

Hopefully northern Iowa has self selected to be surviver of Peak Oil triage.

I realize that the original discussion of triage was in regard to population, but here is my August, 2006 discussion of the topic in regard to the 'burbs. I frequently call Alan Drake my Peak Oil Tranquilizer. At least he has a plan for making things "Not as bad as they would otherwise have been."

http://www.energybulletin.net/19420.html
Net Oil Exports Revisited
Published on 21 Aug 2006 by GraphOilogy / Energy Bulletin. Archived on 21 Aug 2006.
by Jeffrey J. Brown

A Proposed Triage Plan

I believe that vast expanses of American Suburbia are going to become virtually abandoned in the years ahead. Alan Drake has noted that a good deal of suburbia was so poorly constructed that a lot of it is biodegradable. Alan has outlined how we can go back to what we used to have: electric trolley cars connected to electric light rail lines.

CBS Sunday Morning, on 8/20/06, had a segment on "tiny houses." They profiled a home designer and builder who specialized in building very small functional homes of about 100 square feet. You can find more information on his website.

What this builder has realized, and what millions of Americans are just beginning to also realize, is that anything over 100 square feet or so per person is not a necessity; it is optional consumption, a want, instead of a need.

The US is not Switzerland, but Alan Drake has described how Swiss per capita oil consumption in the Second World War was about 0.25% of current US per capita oil consumption. They did it primarily by electrifying their transportation system.

I propose a sort of triage operation: "tiny" homes and multifamily housing along electric mass transit lines. In my opinion, it is the only way that we can preserve some semblance of a civilized society. The suburbs are, by and large, a lost cause.

Triage sounds great -- until you realize that YOU might be the one to be "triaged".

I think the Americans with Disability Act is going to fall by the way side pretty quickly. The capital needed to upgrade streets and buildings is already disappearing.

Wow. I haven't been reading TOD much and comments like this only support my decision. Not everyone has the capability or time to learn the depth of complex systems to the extent of most readers here. But what I do see with many people who lack a formal education, work two jobs, etc... is that they have skills that many elite, educated folks lack AND an attitude to roll up their sleeves and get things done when needed. Best to be in camp with them...

As a first generation college student of humble origins myself, I will attest that I am put off by the JSP term as well--and probably shouldn't be using it. Too many assumptions about class and educational mobility, etc., etc.

When I used it, I meant it in the sense of those unable or unwilling to learn--whether or by choice or by circumstance--about the world around them. I should be defining my terms more clearly.

Yes, it's still way too broad of a brush, but I was trying to make points about the complexity of the systems involved and how difficult it is to learn about this stuff...and how some just cannot or will not ever have the chance to "get" these ideas and in turn will be the ones to suffer for it.

But people can learn and people can change...I see it every day.