David,

I understand what you feel like.  Look into Solar/Wind energy for your home.  If may need to reduce your energy use but you can keep a reasonable amount of it.  Than e-cars, some gardening ((maybe even community farming)).

The main point on this site ((in my feeble opinion)) is to stop being dependent on Industrialized society and become more community based.  That does not mean that we lose everything, but our lives will change.  The longer we wait to make changes the more catastrophic the changes will become for you and your local community.

My advise ((and take it for what it is worth, free)), think of taking different services out off your life and think of the changes that it would make in your life.  Can you live with those changes?    Is it possible to live a life you want to without the service?  Do you need to change your expectations? 

Than you may want to think of; What are the possibilities you would lose the service?  Would you lose the service for only a short period of time, will it just be lost or would it be intermittent?  Maybe your thought is we have a bank holiday and you need to only get through that bump.

After that you may wan to think of; What can you do to overcome those changes and live a life you want to live?  Maybe as simple as adding a few solar panels to afford electricity and continuing to add them to reduce stress on the electric grid around you and you get the savings for it ((and true win-win)).

Most importantly, I advise once you decide the scenario you think is most-likely going to happen, make a plan and follow through.  Nothing worse than having knowledge and not acting on it.  Maybe your plan is too much or too little but if you have the ball rolling you can make changes more easily. 

Best of luck!!

NOTE: In services I mean, either losing or not being able to afford utilities, gasoline, shopping, food, water, etc.

Since you mention cold fusion, it's worth noting that -- after a thorough initial debunking -- it now appears to be for real. A number of scientists (reportedly including U.S. Navy scientists) have produced statistically significant results. Now the problem is determining whether it can be scaled up and used in real world applications. As long as we are throwing trillions of dollars at the economy, a bit of public money (a.k.a. "debt") spent on cold fusion applied research might be worthwhile. After all, we taxpayers are funding some pretty far out projects these days.

There was a time when no respectable scientist wanted his/her name associated with cold fusion research. Evidently that has changed.

Even if we could fix the three E's we would still have nearly 7 billion of us. Only nature knows how to fix that problem.

The machinery that feeds us is grinding to a halt.

We thought money was our slave and now we know we are its. 

Our only future is to feed ourselves and our way to do it is to form human-scale groups with our neighbours. We will argue forever over the big fixes. It is time for us to wean ourselves again. 

Don

________________________________________________

"And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay"

Leonard Cohen - Democracy

I have a couple comments I wanted to make.  First I have a background in physics and trust me - I wouldn't plan any hope of getting around peak oil or future energy problems based on cold fusion.  Fusion reactions happen every day on the earth in laboratories, but the energy put into these experiments is much greater than any energy that is generated.  If you are interested, take a look at the accepted ways that fusion happens - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Locally_cold_fusion .  All of these require a huge amount of energy.  Don't get too excited by the title of locally cold fusion.  The starting particles needed for this process require a lot of energy to produce. The biggest issue with fusion is the energy needed to overcome the strong electrostatic repulsion of two positively charged nuclei. 

Second, I think Ready above gave a great summary of the problem - "The real difficulty lies in the scale of what would need to be produced, and the time and resources necessary to complete the changeover. Simply put, we don't have enough time or resources to prevent a crash, too little too late."  If you look at the electricty generating capacity in the United States - http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat2p2.html , you'll see that renewables are a tiny fraction of the total.  So if you want renewables to replace coal/oil/natural gas/nuclear, there is going to be a tremendous amount of investment required. 

The other issue with renewables is the land use needed.  For example, it takes 17 acres of land to generate 1 MW from a wind farm.  I also just read about a large solar plant being planned in Arizona. It will take 1900 acres of land to generate 280 MW of power. Look at the table above and see how much of a dent 280 MW will make on US electrical production from coal.

As others have stated in this thread, Chris has done a great job of summarizing the problem and this is a great resource to encourage people to get prepared.  Of all the things Chris talks about, I think the energy problem is the biggest threat. Without increasing amounts of energy, the perpetual growth that our current economic system assumes will be there won't be possible.

Hi Davidm,

I certainly can easily recall what an intense period of time it was for me when I first wrapped my head around the big picture and all that it implied.

I am all for thinking of solutions in response to the coming changes, we'll need them and use them, but only if the solutions lead to personal action.  What I mean by this is that sometimes big solutions become an excuse for inaction.  These often take the form of hoping that some new technology will erupt and transform our entire energy landscape.  As mentioned above by Ready, this is really a form of bargaining.

The intellectual way past this point is to just run a simple, back-of-the-envelope assessment of the Time, Scale, and Cost involved in bringing any new technology to market.

This conversation arose a while ago on this site with someone arguing that breeder reactors have been theoretically demonstrated to provide unlimited energy for the next few thousand years.  Here was my response then:

Breeder reactors?

I am still patiently awaiting word on how those will actually be deployed. And I don't mean in a thought-piece in Scientific American.

I mean the real world where concerns over fissile material are real and where lag times, resources, and capital concerns are factored into build-out scenarios.

To my knowledge there have been two actual breeder reactors built - SuperPhoenix in France and a test plant in Japan. Both are now more or less decommissioned due to numerous accidents and a failure to demonstrate the sort of unlimited power that they were hoped to deliver.

My goal for this site is to have good, solid, fact-driven debates that conform to reality and make liberal use of numbers and knowns.

So in the case of breeder reactors I think we've heard quite enough about how great they are and are ready for the next level of that discussion.

Please take the time to add up a few numbers (like Switters has done for nuclear).

• How many will be needed?
• How much do they cost?
• How will the security issues be handled?
• Where will the fissile material come from? Who will control it?
• What's the build-out schedule (how many need to be built per year)?
• Who will do the building? How many skilled workers do they have?
• Assuming we are now moving to an electric society, what sorts of changes to our transportation and electric infrastructure will be needed? How much will this cost? How long will it take to get there?

In my case when I run these questions through my rough understanding of how the world works I come up with answers like "$$$ trillions" and "decades".

Which means I see an energy dip in our future and then I wonder how an economy based on perpetual growth gets through that period with enough gas in the tank to build out all these super-duper, massively capital intensive projects.

My point here is that even if zero-point energy has been reverse engineered off a recovered alien space craft and is sitting in an Area 51 vault right now (I'm being humorous, not serious here...), it will still take decades to scale up the technology and transform our infrastructure away from liquid fuel and towards electricity.

In the meantime, peak oil may already be upon us raising troubling questions about how an economy geared towards perpetual expansion will navigate a decade or more of declining energy inputs.

Lastly, a bonanza of new energy would be a complete disaster for many environmental ecosystems and support systems (such as fresh water aquifers) without some very serious changes to how humans view population growth and their ultimate reliance upon and integration with the natural world. 

The good news is we live in fascinating times and have the opportunity to reshape the future in bold and innovative ways.

Best,
Chris