I think that the United States needs to drastically lower its per capita energy and resource consumption in the short term. Whether "green" tech can accomplish this task is open for debate. Honestly, I don't see this happening soon enough or on a sufficient scale. In the long term it will be necessary to challenge a lot of the assumptions we have taken for granted with respects to how our civilization functions. Unfortunately, it is difficult to give a simple explanation for my lack of optimism. Jared Diamond wrote a whole book on societal collapse. All I can say is that there are a number of very intelligent people who have been looking into the Limits to Growth for some time now. I wonder, is Secular Doomerism a religion?
... the age of abundance is over. The period from 1945 to 2005 when almost unimaginable amounts of cheap petroleum sloshed through the economies of the world’s industrial nations, and transformed life in those nations almost beyond recognition, still shapes most of our thinking and nearly all of our expectations. Not one significant policy maker or mass media pundit in the industrial world has begun to talk about the impact of the end of the age of abundance; it’s an open question if any of them have grasped how fundamental the changes will be as the new age of post-abundance economics begins to clamp down.
Most ordinary people in the industrial world, for their part, are sleepwalking through one of history’s major transitions. The issues that concern them are still defined entirely by the calculus of abundance. Most Americans these days, for example, worry about managing a comfortable retirement, paying for increasingly expensive medical care, providing their children with a college education and whatever amenities they consider important. It has not yet entered their darkest dreams that they need to worry about access to such basic necessities as food, clothing and shelter, the fate of local economies and communities shredded by decades of malign neglect, and the rise of serious threats to the survival of constitutional government and the rule of law.
