Good effort to send Tony where he belongs!

as a counterpoint to the previous gloomy predictions – i think that this project is a great idea:

Sun, wind and wave-powered: Europe unites to build renewable energy “supergrid”: from the Guardian

once again richard heinberg has written a compelling article that echoes my thoughts. here are a couple of quotes, but i highly recommend reading the whole thing.

Climate change is just one of several enormous interrelated dilemmas that will sink civilization unless all are somehow addressed. These include at least five long-range problems:

* topsoil loss (25 billion tons per year),
* worsening fresh water scarcity,
* the death of the oceans (currently forecast for around 2050 based on current trends),
* overpopulation and continued population growth, and
* the accelerating, catastrophic loss of biodiversity.

As events are unfolding now, these problems, together with climate change, will combine over the next few years or decades to trigger a food crisis of a scale and intensity that will dwarf to insignificance any famine in human history.

To make matters even more grim, there are two near-term dilemmas that may make climate change and these other problems much harder to address: peak oil and economic collapse.

…

To summarize: three factors—the need for resilience, the lack of effective policy at national and global levels, and the tendency of the best responses to emerge regionally and at a small scale—argue for dealing with the crushing crises of the new century locally, even though there is still undeniable need for larger-scale, global solutions.

Does this mean we should give up even trying to work at the national and global levels? Each person will have to make up her or his own mind on that one. To my thinking, Copenhagen is something of a last straw. I have no interest in trying to discourage anyone from undertaking national or global activism. Indeed, there is a danger in taking attention away from national and international affairs: policy could get hijacked not just by parties even less competent than those currently in command, but by ones that are just plain evil. Nevertheless, this writer is finally convinced that, with whatever energies for positive change may be available to us, we are likely to accomplish the most by working locally and on a small scale, while sharing information about successes and failures as widely as possible.

read the full article here…