Of course they dont....
Its the age old "technology wont save us" argument. Even tho technology has been "saving" us ever since humans invented the spear and the axe to hunt with. Without technology, we would have died out milennia ago. The idea of dieoff and armageddon is too sexy to let go, even tho we are at least 2 years past peak and none of this has happened yet....

Wow. Thanks for clearing that up for me. I didn't know that technology saved so many people! Now I can go home and skin a saber tooth with my bare teeth and fix everything

[quote="Offshore"]
Is there a law against posting about expensive things?
[quote]

Not a law but a methodology - namely to look at the 'true' environmental impact of a product you have to assess also the amount of energy used in manufacture, servicing, disposal, etc. Not that a hydrogen-powered BMW is 'wong' because of its fuel - but simply because it is a BMW (grin).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_energy

JP

pstarr, technology saved people who were yet to be born, thus illustrating that we have the ability to alter our environment. It saved countless billions.

We can always invent our way out of it and save countless billions.

We invented the plow

Go us!

ra ra re. ra ra rip. ain't we a pip

Don't get us wrong we would love some "solutions" its just that you have NOT GIVEN US ANY!

That solar home and hydrogen BMW are NOT solutions to our energy problems. In fact they are more unsustainable that what we are running as is evidenced by their price tags and expensive oil other resources will not make them cheaper.

Technology is a good slave but a VERY poor master. Unless we realise that the machine that created all these golden eggs, can ONLY create golden eggs (without a complete rebuild) then we really have a problem. Ongoing, I would say.

Any solution has to involve initial recognition of this fact. If that happens, we can move on. But not until...

JP

I am not a doomer and believe a transition to a new sustainable energy paradigm, or at least a bridge system can occur but the things you are highlighting are not a 'solution'. If we had 30 years to peak oil, maybe.

The problem is peak oil is now or within the next decade so we can't mitigate the damaging economic consequences. The world’s car fleets, let alone the housing stock, take a long time to renew.

Sure, we could all demand a nice BMW hydrogen car but can BMW supply 300 million for the western world and, if so, at what price? Especially considering the fact we could be in recession and the supply/demand picture will quickly make them unaffordable to all but the richest. The same goes for housing, could US industry build 50 million eco homes? Would people knock down their current homes and accept the cost? What about the unimaginable amount of raw materials needed for such a task?

Are you beginning to understand the pessimism?

Not expensive for that huge-ass house.

I have a solar-powered cabin (not 100% solar yet, but I'm working on it) that cost me a total of about $12,000 to build. $2000 was for the solar system. Another 5 grand worth of batteries, solar cells and maybe a small windmill (plus a lot of labor) and I can take this thing off the grid.

No.

I'm invested in oil services and drillers because I believe the Peak Oil hypothesis is correct and the supply/demand imbalance will lead to higher commodity and stock prices. I'm also invested in gold bullion because we still have a Democrat Party.

However, although post-peak Maracaibo looks a lot like Water World, I just don't see Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior in the cards. If America ever turns into Nigeria it will be due to left-wing political policies and not because of Peak Oil.

I had you pegged for a republican bush-sucking idiot. you just verified that.

You guys are quick to point out how useless this kind of thing is, and how it's not nearly enough.

But stop and think for a second;

would you rather see the yuppies attempting to be green,

or would you rather see this demographic have no interest what-so-ever in the environment?

Perhaps you would be happier if they kept on buying inefficient Mcmansion's, and perhaps a Hummer in every driveway?

Yeah it's not enough. Of course it's not enough. But it's a step in the right direction. And it's the people with the wealth that most need to make this step.

Better they start buying solar powered homes and hopeless attempts at renewable transport, rather than go the other way, right?

Or would some of you be happier if the trend was for everyone to upgrade the Hummers into Mac Trucks? Would you be happier if the people with all the money did not have any interest in investing into renewables?

While some applications really do help out people quite a bit, I think it's more like technology can cause problems or provide solutions. It is after all just technology, the application is what's good or bad depending on POV. When it's causing a problem do to it's misuse wrt the greater good, like what's called PO here, the solution to the problem is to stop using technology to cause the problem.

Clearly any step forward is a good thing; all other factors equal, solar homes and non-fossil-fueled vehicles are a plus. However the more you look into the population/resource equation, the more you have to conclude that what is needed is an effort on a scale that would dwarf WW2.

As well, the built-in systemic lags, even under optimistic assumptions (3 years to build a nuclear reactor and 5 years to turn over the vehicle fleet), are such that by the time the impacts are recognized incontrovertibly, it will be too late to turn it around. The titanic is heading for the iceberg and the best that can be hoped for is to reduce speed by the time of impact.

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Pstarr, cut the ad-hominems, they don't do any good. See below for a more productive alternative.

---

Offshore, during six years of single-party Republican rule, we spent enough money in Iraq to have built:

150 nuclear reactors
and
100,000 utility-scale wind farms
and
five million solar roofs.

And at present, Bush is asking for another $200 B-as-in-Big billion, which would have been another 100 nuclear plants, 50,000 wind farms, and five million more solar roofs.

At the same time our military is stretched so thin that General Schoomaker (Joint Chiefs) has said "we are in danger of breaking the active component," which is traditionally-understated military language for "you f---ing fools are destroying the Army."

Meanwhile we suffered the first full-scale loss of a major metropolitan area in US history.

Can you honestly tell me that this administration is even remotely competent?

---

Back to architecture for a moment:

My God that place is Ugly! It resembles nothing so much as a rectangular aquarium tank where all the fishies can be seen swimming around.

A flat roof is an oxymoron, and flat roofs are a plague in California. Water does not run off of flat surfaces, instead it pools up and seeks any way out including down through imperfections in the surface, and into the structural members.

And the modern fetish for vast expanses of plate glass is downright gross. Welcome to the Age of the Panopticon, where privacy is a thing of the past and your every move is visible to your nosy neighbors. Just like Eugene Zamyatin's novel We, which was the inspiration for Orwell's 1984. In Zamyatin's socialistic dystopia, people lived in glass apartments where all was visible except during the designated "sexual hours" when curtains could be pulled closed. And now we seem to be creating it and putting a high price tag on it to make it attractive, "open" floorplans included.

There are plenty of high-efficiency solar designs that are a hell of a lot more liveable than that. Interestingly enough, the Bush house in Crawford is a great example, including the interior space being partitioned into specific rooms for specific purposes so that heating and cooling can be concentrated on rooms that are occupied, rather than heating or cooling an entire "open" floorplan while the occupants cluster in a corner to read a story or watch a movie. Now if only Bush had applied a similar degree of common sense to our energy policies, we would have by now built enough nuclear, wind, and solar capacity to tell the Arabs to go pound sand.

Well, if we are all screwed...why sit here blogging about it pstarr? Start the dieoff for us....