Applause!!!------standing up first.........And for your list of ways to decrease the impact of peak oil to our society.

I also appreciate reading the wealth of information that is provided by this site.

Thank-you!

As for me, I provide 80% of my own food and 50% of my own energy from local sources. I hope to increase my local energy use to 70% when I finish my home biodiesel reactor and increase my energy conservation standards. And no, I don't "compost my own s**t".

A sustainable society is indeed possible if people wake up in time............

Mountain Firekeeper

1. Lack of transparency is helping to drive prices higher, and push conservation and conversion.  One thing it's not doing is creating complacency, and complacency is a bad thing.
2. Not sure if independence is necessary, but dependence which supports hostile nations or movements is a bad idea.
3. That seems to be happening.
4. Economy standards are the wrong target.  CAFE regulations did nothing to decrease petroleum consumption in the USA; only high prices did.  If you want to cut consumption, the best way is to make every opportunity for economy an opportunity for savings.  Taxes will do that nicely.
5. That was a bad law, widely hated and evaded at every opportunity.  Bringing it back would damage the cause.  Why not let people with Insights or electric vehicles cruise at 75, while the guzzlers have to go slow?  Give people a choice.
6. Decreasing traffic will mean people can cover more distance (and use more fuel) in their available time, meaning some of them will do it.  This is unlikely to yield as much benefit as projected, any more than road expansions yield the relief projected.
7. Mass transit is unsuitable for suburban and exurban housing patterns.
8. Infrastructure is insufficient; rail has the "last mile" problem even worse than the Internet.  It needs something like intermodal systems, perhaps like Blade Runner.
9. Good idea.
10. "All forms" might not all be compatible with each other or the type of land use.  Some modes (e.g. skating) might be best left for recreation.
11. Good.
12. Local power may not be the best investment; the economics of wind or hydro might be much better 100 miles away and justify investment in transmission.  Not everything is better done locally (think of a solar installation north of a mesa); all investments should justify themselves.

• Promote cogeneration.  Infrastructure for DSM and micro-scheduling would do more to save fuel than rails, ties and ballast, and most of it is information systems.
• "Make the invisible visible."  Mandate economy displays on all car instrument clusters.  Add timing information to traffic lights so drivers who aren't going to make them can coast instead of being hit by a yellow with no warning.
• Make cars complain about bad driving habits.
• Make driving habits which use excessive energy (especially ones which force other drivers to waste energy in traffic) into citable offenses.

Since this is a global issue, consider a more global approach. This list looks very American-centric--certainly points 2, 4, and 5 lean that way. And that implicitly assumes an effort to keep what exists now--point 4, 5, and 6 sound like efforts to maintain the US car culture. They are all good ideas, and all need to be done, but they are just a start, and will take a long time to get traction.

Don't confuse energy independence with sustainability. Being sustainable may make you energy independent, but being energy independent (say, by drilling ANWAR and digging all the uranium and burning all the coal) won't make you sustainable.

I'm amazed at how consistently press reports blame excessive demand for oil on China and India's thirst. Yes, they are asking for more oil at the margins. But America is the base load, and a far, far larger consumer than anyone else. The US has a moral obligation to cut consumption far more than any other country--and has far less of a sense of responsibility to the world. There's a lot of denial to work on.

They're planning to quietly clear the lease sale in the next few weeks.
Article

I think that one of the guiding principles of good energy policy should be to use the simplest, most flexible mechanism(s) possible to achieve the desired goals.  To me, that means (in part) using the minimum number of legal and regulatory interventions, and keeping those you do use as broad as possible.  The recent Bush proposed rules change about increasing CAFE standards very modestly, and indexing them to vehicle weight is a terrific example of getting it wrong, IMO--if GM is reworking aan SUV and they can't quite make the MPG rating for its weight class, they suddenly have an incentive to make the vehicle heavier so it has an easier MPG target.  

I've mentioned before that I think we need a new gasoline tax with a pre-announced schedule of increases, to encourage people to think longer term and move to more efficient vehicles.  I would also want to use part of that revenue stream for building renewable energy facilities, like wind farms.  We're right at the beginning of a transition of our transportation energy from oil to electricity, so improving our electricity generation capacity and the grid overall are key components of an effort to move away from oil.  (Plus, natural gas will be the next fossil fuel to peak, making winter heating demand move to electricity, also.)

Investing in mass transit is a good thing, and I would love to see Americans use it more often.

I would add a major effort to educate the public about the realities of our energy situation and the personal benefits to them in the short run as well as the longer term of conserving.  For example, show people how they can get 20 to 30% better mileage from their existing car, and save $X per week, just by changing their driving style, and you get their attention in a hurry.  If they do the right thing for selfish reasons, that's fine, as long as we find a way to get them to do the right thing.

So I think things have to get bad before people will want change. Human history clearly shows that we always try to go the easy route, then we end up with a mess that needs to be cleaned up down the road. We may have intelligence, but that doesn't make the average person very smart.

Maybe I sound a little elitist, I'm really not. I simply don't have any faith in humanity. For thousands of years the forward thinking ones among us have had to drag the rest of society along kicking and screaming. Look at Galileo. Most people from his time couldn't accept his POV. He was considered a threat to TPTB and was persecuted for it. He questioned things that people had long believed to be true. Sure society eventually learned that he was correct, but it took far too long. So how can I have any faith in humanity to deal with a problem of even greater magnitude now? This is far more in our interests to "get right", yet only now do you see hints that a greater number of people are taking this seriously.

I converted my 82 MB 300d to run on recycled Vegetable oil that cost 5 cents a gallon to filter.

Why aren't more people doing this!?!?!?!?

Rising fuel prices will eventually force many US trucking companies to hang it up as well. This alone, due to the number of companies and people involved, and the lack of any viable alternative, is extremely problematic in terms of transition. Ship point to point and then use EV for distribution in cities? Switch to truck-trains like in Australia, with hubs outside the city proper? All the rail spurs to suburban and rural locations have been pulled up and salvaged. All that is left is big city to big city basically.

I do think the suburban layout can be worked using EV and local light rail. It works with buses already in many cities - just punt the buses and replace with light rail. Then use EV to get to the train station, which is nearby. For trips under 120 miles, 12VDC lead acid batteries will work fine - you don't need anything fancy, just something cheap people can afford. Gas prices will do the rest.

One of the biggest problems facing the US is that it is a system totally designed for personal vehicle transportation. So how do you make this work to your advantage? How do we use the interstate highway system rather than let it fall into disuse?

If we go for building new infrastructure, the cost and time line makes success more problematic. So how do we rethink things and use what we have already built?

#2 is very important - it needs to be understood this has a high priority. The federal energy department should have the prestige of the defense department, and the good administration and much higher funding levels to match, and other government localities should make it a priority too (many already are).

#7, #8, and #10 could make a big difference too. A good part of the increase in energy spending should go to mass transit, rail, and local walkability infrastructure, to make a significant dent in our transportation energy problem.

Of the others, I don't think most will actually be helpful as government-imposed solutions; these are the sort of things that work best by working WITH the market, rather than against it. Make sure energy prices stay high; tax fossil energy use heavily, and we should make quick progress an all the efficiency-related measures, and it will encourage alternative energy sources too.

The one other thing not on your list that's needed: very heavy investment in R&D and demonstration projects for energy alternatives. The piddling 1 GW levels of wind and solar today need to be magnified a thousand times at least to make a significant switch away from fossil fuels possible.

2. Reform gas taxes so that driving is not subsidized, and institute congestion charges in more places. The inflation-adjusted federal gas tax is now lower than its 1959 peak, in spite of three separate increases over the past 20 years. Gas taxes only cover 35% of all federal, state and local expenditures on highways, while 61% are covered by vehicle taxes, property taxes, income taxes and bonds. That doesn't begin to account for expenditures on police and emergency services, and the costs of pollution and other externalities. Therefore, people who drive more are subsidized by those who drive less. Gas taxes in the U.S. usually don't cover municipal street expenditures, so people who mostly use highways are subsidized by people who mostly use urban streets.

The spatial inequities are huge. The American landscape is the result of a century of state and federal highway investments directed to suburban and rural areas, consistently shortchanging urban areas. The money went to gold-plated highway projects serving rural areas and sprawl on the metropolitan fringes. Also, state and local formulas for distributing highway funds are often biased. Therefore, many urban areas contribute significantly more in tax receipts than they receive in state highway fund allocations or local transfers.

http://business.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1943332005

Sure, the government will bail them out, and their pension funds will be trashed and the taxpayer will pick up the bill. But every time this happens, the dollar is devalued as the Fed prints more money to cover it.

The government bailing out these big companies is creating a pension fund insurance crisis already.  

To say that the government will bail out airlines forever is not valid. If they persist in doing this for US airlines and automobile companies, then the resulting inflation will tip over quite a few precarious financial apple carts. Then we will see true demand destruction...

Rather than commenting on the particulars of your proposal, I wanted to point out that what you are doing here is trying to reframe the debate around energy and sustainability.

In that context, I highly, highly recommend that you read George Lakoff's book Don't Think of an Elephant.  The author is a linguist and cognitive scientist who is interested in how the way people think influences politics.  It's a short, easy read, and makes some very critical points about what is required to change public perception and generate political will.

Also, Lakoff runs a thinktank called the Rockridge Institute, which works on the reframing problem.  A good bit of the contents of his book are available for free on the website.