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Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century Alex Steffen See book keywords and concepts

But your utility will use your fees to build new wind farms, solar arrays, or other systems, which helps transition the electricity infrastructure away from the oil economy. If there are no renewable sources or green-power programs in your area, you can stil do your part by purchasing renewable-energy certificates (RECs, also known as green tags). By doing so, you are funding the advancement of renewable power in other areas that have such programs. How do I find green power? Organizations like the U.S.

The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century James Howard Kunstler See book keywords and concepts

During the hundred-plus-year run of the world oil economy, the United States has never ceased to be the world's leading consumer of oil. The United States remained the world's leading oil producer and exporter for much of the twentieth century. The stupendous destruction and disruptions attending World War II left America preeminent in the oil business for a quarter-century afterward. Europe and Asia were ravaged by the war, but the American mainland was not touched. The United States emerged with its manufacturing and oil infrastructure intact.

This is all possible because the world has been at or around the historic peak of oil production, meaning the oil economy at the millennium was at its most robust just when these wind farms were set up.

What happens without the fantastic technological support of the oil economy in the background? The advanced industrial nations need to have all the necessary alternative energy infrastructure in place long before that background support disappears. Still, it begs the question about anything beyond the short-term future. The advanced nations could consciously commit themselves to dedicating some portion of the world's remaining oil endowment to the production of wind turbines, solar arrays, and batteries—but don't count on it happening.

The catch is that the oil economy platform has to be there in the first place. For instance, those gigantic turkey breeding operations run by ConAgra are possible only in an agricultural system run on cheap oil and natural gas, in particular to manufacture fertilizer for raising the grains fed to the turkeys, but also for housing, processing, freezing, transporting, and marketing the birds at a gigantic scale of enterprise that ends in the freezer section of a 150,000-square-foot mega-supermarket.

The character of our communities and the activities that go on in them will be greatly determined by how we are able to get around—how people and things might be transported in the post-cheap oil economy. We can be confident that the current set of arrangements will not endure. Everyday life deeper in the twenty-first century will be as starkly different to people living today as the America of 1955 was different for someone who was a child before World War I. The automobile age as we have known it will be over.

In addition to the administrative problems in organizing a nuclear program (arguably greater than those faced by the national railroad project) is the fact that an underlying oil economy would be required to build and run a comprehensive system of nuclear reactors. Similarly problematic is whether the project of restoring America's railroads could be organized at a scale equal to the gigantic task. In the Long Emergency, all large-scale enterprises will have trouble operating in virtually every sphere of activity.

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