Could I do more..sure! Do I think about doing more…all the time. Am I alone here in America in terms of thinking about being more conservative and frugal in my use of resources..no, of course not.

My gut instinct tells me that we are on the cusp of great changes in the next 10 years. Being American yourself, I am sure that you understand what this country can do once it puts its mind to accomplishing something. The progressive.com sponsorship of the x-prize for a production car that does 100 mpg is just an example. GM closing 5 truck plants in the US is a direct response to the current american focus on smaller vehicles so there is definitely a dramatic response to the increase in the cost of gas. I saw a Ford advertisement on tv today about its trucks now being offered to the public at employee prices. No-one wants them!

Personally, I find it very difficult wading through the information and disinformation about nuclear power. My one fear of a reliance on a move to Nuclear is that a direct result will be a lack of focus placed on other alternatives. Nuclear is the only source of power that “today” will allow us to dramatically reduce our carbon footprint AND still meet current and future consumption demands. And I HATE that fact simply because the impact of a nuclear accident is so dramatic and long lasting in terms of fallout. However, as a realist I have to face the facts that there is no other economic alternative today. And this all comes down to economics at the end of the day.

I saw your comment about the Tropical Rainforest Coalition..are they the real deal?

Kevin

With one night of rain I checked it and it filled the 100 liter water butt. So I should get the 250. It fill cans faster to water the garden. Also when I was a child my Italian gran mother always had a trash can down the hill for her tomato garden It collected the snow and rain in the spring and then she used that to water the garden. If it got low she topped it up with the hose. Much better than using a hose.

Call me a surprised water butt gardener now.

Logan’s Run?

Now I find myself wondering a lot about how the collision between peak oil and climate politics is going to play out. Climate change gets a lot of lip service, especially in the developed world, and it looks like emissions trading markets are going to spread slowly over the next few years (Europe was the pioneer, Australia is doing it now, the USA will probably do it next), but it’s still pretty disconnected from the core economics of energy. The price rises in oil and other basic goods have everyone’s attention, however.

I have pretty much concluded that the doubling in the oil price over the past 12-18 months is mostly due to the US economic bust – the really steep climb in prices began in August 2007, at the time of the financial crisis; all the investment money that was seeking returns from corporate debt bonds and rising property values has fled into commodities, and with all that extra money seeking to buy, sellers can ask for more and more. I have no idea if prices will stay where they are or even keep climbing, or whether there’ll be a little collapse in demand brought on by world recession, but clearly everyone is now looking for alternatives to oil even more than before. The key green issue is likely to be coal; the earlier rise in oil prices already led to an increase in coal-burning in Asia, we’re a very long way from peak coal, and coal-to-oil liquefaction means it’s even relevant as a vehicular fuel. I see less and less resistance to nuclear; people worry more about the military/terrorist uses than the environmental implications now, I think; though greens will always say ‘if we just committed completely to renewables, none of these problems would even exist’.

Anyway, my real point is that energy scarcity now is going to loom ten times larger in politics than climatic disaster fifty years from now. In all likelihood climate considerations will be reduced to just one factor in the economics of dealing with the new scarcity – a powerful one, but not an all-determining one. This intriguing new grouping of the eleven big energy consumers – G8 plus China, India, and South Korea – is probably where the middle-range energy future is going to be decided; these are the high-tech countries who have the capacity to invent, industrialize, and market new energy sources and channels of distribution.

What were we talking about? Oh yes, being green. Well, the truth probably is that most people are irrelevant to what happens from here. I played no part in W3C’s HTML specification process, except the very distant role of being one of the webby end-users, and yet here I am using browsers and reading webpages meant to comply with their standards. The same thing is going to happen with environmental policy; it’ll be just like economic policy. Brainstormed by academic theorists, optimized by technocratic brain trusts, run through the political sausage factory, and constantly revised in the face of unanticipated real-world developments.

So i think green is going to be a bit ubiquitous and ho-hum (indeed, I think it’s there already). But dealing with a rocketing life expectancy brought on by biotechnology – now that would be a destabilizing development to look forward to, eh? :-)