Green jounalism's problem is that given the premises, there just isn't much to write about. The earth is warming at a catastrophic rate, the warming is caused by CO2, immediate action is needed to prevent flooding and so on. The premises are dubious but that is not really the point. Achieving a substantial reduction in emissions would require dismantling much of our economy. As everyone knows, the main alternative energy sources, wind and solar, function only intermittently and are inefficient as well.

It adds up to a depressing scenario, but only if you accept the premises. But the Green Journalist cannot do this. Because taking a constant downbeat attitude is impossible, the only alternative for the green journalist is to write TreeHugger stories, or try to confuse the issue of energy independence (no imported oil) with the issue of no fossil fuels.

Our global technological advances and Western lifestyle for 150 years has been fueled by the stored energy, in the form of coal, oil and natural gas, of the last sixty MILLION years. We are nearing the end of that cheap ride. It will be exhausted, domestic or imported, in our lifetime. Conflating the relative merits of efficiency or economic burdens is the functional definition of moot. Any pointless semantic arguments that delay the development and implementation of the inevitable abandonment of the petroleum model will cost millions of lives and may preclude the possibility of our very survival as a civilized society. Do prefer photovoltaics or banging rocks together?

Drew -- what if you're wrong? What if it isn't exhausted in our lifetimes because of improvements in efficiency? Clearly we can't go back to the horse and buggy.

I don't know how old you are, but I'm 44. I don't think we'll see the end of fossil fuels in my lifetime -- too many are being discovered even now. A large field is believed to exist off the Falklands, there is the known but untapped ANWR field, and the rapidly-developing improvements in extracting oilsand and oilshale.

What certain people are doing is saying there will be a crisis. Well, there's always been a crisis. When I was a child the globla crisis global cooling (look it up), and population growth. The book "Future Shock" predicted world-wide famine by 1989, a time when world hunger was at one of its lowest rates in recorded history, and we saw a major step toward global freedom with the dissolution of the USSR.

The choice isn't "photovotaics or rocks," especially when you consider how much petroleum it takes to manufacture photovoltaics. Basically, I'm saying its easy to get caught up in the "doom and gloom" predictions and miss out on the rapid advances in technology. I expect there will be a change away from fossil fuels, when there is an economic advantage to doing so, just as ships gave up sails when the steam engine became more efficient than sails (it wasn't at first). This used to be called "progress" and the people who favored it were seen as "progressive" but the word has become coopted.

Read. Read more. If the combined efforts of the best and brightest in the West have yielded nothing like North Sea, North Slope, much less Saudi Arabia in terms of size and ease of extraction it simply is not there. Add skyrocketing consumption/competition from China and India and you see that global peak oil occurred in 2005. Shale, tar sands and deep water drilling consume almost as much capital/energy as they provide. It is an finite resource on the backside curve. Throw in environmental costs and it is clearly a dying model. Why wait for the last drop, of oil or the blood shed for the remaining dregs? Delay and denial to the end will bring back the horse. Paradigm change now gives us a chance. Read 'The Long Emergency'. I am 46. This will not ruin the rest of my life. If we do not act, my son's first car will be a horse.

Drew, I'm sorry, but I don't agree. This is just the current thing to panic over -- the same phenomena that had scientists spreading coal dust to stop the progress of glaciers, as a test to see if global cooling could be controlled back in the 1970s. Twenty years from now, we'll have another crisis to worry about, but it won't be this one. While inaction is a problem, so is excess fear.

Control Population

Wow, Trappy, so you figure this is nothing because...what? I mean, your logic is that past crises weren't as bad as people thought, so maybe the future won't be all that bad either, right? And if there is a problem, the magic invisible hand of the market will rix everything, right? Either that or Jesus will come back. Take your pick. And speaking of excess fear, your boy Bush has deadened that nerve through constant excess stimulation. You guys are so afraid of terrorists under yout beds that you just don't have any sensible fear left for the stuff that is ACTUALLY HAPPENING. Go figure.

One of my favorite all-time quotes is some Saudi oil minister saying "the stone age didn't end because they ran out of stones", referring to the inevitable end of the oil age. We don't have to run out of oil for it to be a major problem. The use of oil is increasing faster than new reserves are being found. And there is no way to know exactly how much oil is actually in the ground. And as more oil is removed from the proven reserves, the pressure in those fields decreases, making it more expensive to extract the oil. Overall, not a good scenario for an oil-based economy.

There are many forms of alternative, renewable energy. Not one of them will replace oil in entirety. That doesn't mean collectively they can't. For the last three decades, since the first oil shock, the oil industry has been telling us none of these alternatives are economically viable. They were right, when oil was under $30 per barrel But now it's over $70 and likely to climb even more, and biofuels and wind are cheaper than fossil fuel energy, and much cleaner. Solar will be economically viable without subsidies in about five years, and that's going to change things big time, as there is a lot of sunshine here in the U.S. (I guess also in the middle east too - maybe somebody can sell them solar panels and electricity-to-hydrogen machines).

I just don't get the opposition to moving as fast as we can to renewable energy. It's a win for U.S. farmers, it reduces carbon emissions, it reduces our trade deficit, and it decreases our reliance on countries that hate us. It will create jobs in the U.S., and instead of shipping half of every dollar from the gas pump to some country that uses it to finance terrorists, some farmer or truck driver or bio-refinery worker will get those dollars, and spend them here.

Yes, basically I think the invisible hand of the market will fix things. The oil situation is truly finite. What that means is that eventually the cost of using it will grow, because the supply of it is dwindling. When it becomes too expensive, alternatives will arise, because people will switch to the cheaper option -- that's the invisible hand of the marketplace, espoused by Adam Smith and shown by history to work.

My logic is that every 20 years or so a new "crisis" comes along, and every 20 years or so we fix that one or realize it was never a crisis in the first place, and we move on. The real topic of this thread, initially, was global warming. I've talked to and read article by a number of climatologists who say the observable climate changes are well within this normal planet's variations -- the global warming concern is fearmongering, just as bad as anything done by the current president, but much more pervasive as it's being foisted on more people.

Bush bashing isn't going to upset me. He wasn't my first choice. I'm not afraid of terrorists under my bed, but I think the country has a vested interest in trying to keep terrorists away from there and from other U.S. venues.

So Bottomfeeder, why don't we take a look at your "premises"?

The earth is warming at a catastrophic rate, the warming is caused by CO2, immediate action is needed to prevent flooding and so on. The premises are dubious but that is not really the point.

So, you consider these things to be "dubious" despite the concurrence of the great majority of actual, working Climate Scientists. An yes, despite the ravings of ill informed GW deniers there really is such a consensus. But you and the decider obviously prefer to get your climate science from mediocre sci-fi writers like Michael Chriton...

Achieving a substantial reduction in emissions would require dismantling much of our economy. As everyone knows, the main alternative energy sources, wind and solar, function only intermittently and are inefficient as well.

So, by some unalterable law of nature the cure has to be worse than the disease? Another very big and unproven "premise," and astonishingly insulting to our scientists and engineers. Much of what needs to be done can be achieved by energy efficiency increases, using less energy to do the things we need to do, and this has been shown to be an economic stimulus.

But you've already given up and decided that civilization itself can no longer exist without unlimited cheap oil -and that we're just not clever enough to work out alternatives. I thought you corporatist types had unlimited belief in technical innovation and human resourcefulness, but here it suddenly runs out.

People don't just roll over and die because they have to burn less oil, and whether by planning to protect the climate or simply market forces there is no way to avoid the coming oil crunch. If we don't develop the technology the rest of the world will, and will make a great deal of money doing so.

But because you assume there is no problem, but that (if it does exist) it is completely unfixable, you find green journalists dishonest for not slipping into a vegetative depressed state over how bad things are. But for those of us not invested in denying the existence of a problem there is no contradiction in being hopeful, and wanting to learn about successful efforts to address the problem.

You are panicking a .7 degree increase over 100 years is not a catastrophy.

Meanwhile back to your cave for some hunting and gathering.