I'll find that interview. It might even be over here, somewhere.

The problem with replacing the built world is there is no consensus about how world should be. There are lots of tentative inquiries which are steps in the right direction. I tell people they hae to figure out how to live in the nineteenth century otherwise they will wind up in the fourteenth century!

I like peak availability. It's like my chlid! The big complaint I have with it in the 1990's means the time to effectively act is past - the opportunity to take appropriate action 'come and gone' before anyone noticed there was a problem! This indicates another level of problem or 'Probleme' (for problem and meme) beyond the level of the 'Wicked Problem'. to that of the 'Hyper- wicked Problem'.

A Hyper- wicked problem is one whose existence isn't even discovered until after the opportunity to address it has passed. This kind of hyper- wicked problems are wrapped in existential paradoxes ... like the discussion I had here a little with aangel about the oil price level that would finance new production or energy alternatives being far above the price level that causes fatal destruction to the economy itself. I suspect a lot of these kinds of 'Problemes' will be turning up like bad pennies in the very near future.

There is no rule book for the situation we find ourselves in right now, frankly.

Oil needs to be used to manage the transition and keep people fed. Another problem is 'ramping up' alternatives is more energy wasteful with the goal or intent of increased alternatives not guaranteed. Throwing money (energy) at fusion or hydrogen - for instance - or at wave power might not return anything on the investments and the time and invested energy would be lost. This is itself another wicked problem, as the risk attached to an investment might be greater than any return yet discovering this requires the investment. This gears into your remark about replacing infrastucture.

I think your question could be better answered if people had a more comprehensive collection of skills. Creative skills are a good substitute for the brute force and mechanical leverage of cheap energy. Having gone in the one direction, it's been easy to unlearn the skills needed to go the other direction. This makes creating your model very difficult. People can grasp the need but cannot calculate the next step ...

"I wish someone would come up with a model comparing the amount of available energy prospectively"

Shortonoil over at the PO forums has an energy availability model according to which we are now at about 12% (as I recall) of remaining energy out of the original total of available recoverable energy we started with. This is a pretty grim picture of where we are, even for people used to the grimness of peak oil.

I don't think there is any remote posibility of "replacing built infrastructure." We will be learning to live (and die) without a lot of things we took for granted. Presumably the energy required to replace the built infrastructure would be comprable to the amount needed to build it in the first place. And if shortonoil is right, it presumably took much of the 88% of originally available energy we have used so far to build it.

Not bloody likely that we can do the same job with the 12% we have left.