This article by zogger (one of the primary stewards of technocrat.net) discusses the fact that there is currently no viable replacement for fossil fuels as an energy source to sustain industrial lifestyle in anything resembling its present form. It's interesting to see people who hold what Ran refers to as an "accelerationist" mindset beginning to grapple with the possible reality that the basis for their entire paradigm -- deifying "progess" as an almighty constant -- may be running on empty.

Electricity is energy, there's lots of ways of making it, but all the best ones require consuming some sort of fuel, whether it be coal or gas or diesel or isotopes, and I say "Best" to mean all the ones capable of generating enough electricity to avoid a total global industrial collapse...

No gigawatt for 24 hours a day electricity generation sites and you have no metal production, of any kind, anywhere in anything above jewellery / trinket volumes, and you have no coal production either, and no gas production, and of course no petrochemical production, so that's all your fossil fuels and plastics gone overnight.

Suddenly wind farms and hybrid cars don't look so practical, in fact the only wind farms there will be will be those already built, and as they wear out or break down, that's it.

None of these "green" morons has the slightest conception of what this will mean, for them, and everyone else.

If "green morons" are defined as people who think we can continue our plastic-suburban-car lifestyle unchanged by simply replacing power plants with windmills and recycling aluminum cans, then I tend to agree with him. Of course, neither he nor anyone posting in the comment section (so far) has even broached the possibility that "global industrial collapse" might actually be the best possible scenario for the long term health of the planet (and thus, in turn, human beings).

Some of the comments are worth reading too. They range from outright denial, to funny statements like this one. "It doesn't make sense to drive an electric car when gas is $3 a gallon, but at $30 a gallon, people will put up with the 150 mile range and the battery replacment costs if the alternative is to take the bus to work."

It's so laden with assumptions likely to pass unnoticed by anyone who has not taken a moment to step out of the dominant cultural mindset that a little dissecting is in order. First off, it's assumed that people must travel a long distance every day to get to "work", and will continue to do so no matter the expense or inconvenience. Second, for reasons unexplained, the bus is something to be avoided at all costs! (That statement is especially myopic considering that there are already plenty of people in America who make it to work every day on mass transit; although when the oil crunch really comes, even many mass transit systems will be pushed to the limits of economic feasibility.)

We are indeed due for a new technological leap in human evolution, as the mode we've grown accustomed to is far too inefficient to last us much longer. But some of the most obvious modes of optimization are left completely off the table by these folks. In the above-linked essay, Ran wrote:

What if they build a world-simulation program to tell them how best to administer progress, and it tells them the optimal global society is tribes of forager-hunters? Now that would be a new evolutionary level -- in irony. Then would they cripple their own computers by withholding data or reprogramming them until they got answers compatible with their human biases?

The ethnocentric cry of "our present way of life is the only way, the best way." *sigh*

I've managed to turn this little link post into quite a little rant of my own. Just felt the need to share, I suppose.