gee, I've responded to all of your inane, ridiculous, immature and totally unrealistic solutions...
have I stopped driving? No. Is that the end of the story? No. We switched my wife's 20 MPG wagon to a 45 MPG geo. As soon as my job does not require me to own a van, later this fall, then that rig is also gone and will be replaced with a 30-40MPG rig. I have started to set up a small biodiesel plant to feed my truck. I stopped working on the road as much and have been working within 3 miles of home during the summer for three years. I had intended to do more bicycle commuting this year, but it didn't happen. Maybe next year.
At this house, I have grid electricity, but the place i lived before this was powered by solar panels, backed up by a small generator in the winter when it rained for weeks. My fridge was propane, and it used very little of that. I hope to get my well off the grid in the next 12 months, powered by solar. I get most of my produce now from a local farm, and most of meat comes from my farm, or neighbor's farms, or game that friends give me, or fish that I catch. I admit that I've done better at this in the past, but right now we work alot to pay a steep mortgage and have school age kids, and a low impact lifestyle in a rural setting is a little harder to pull off right now, but I am making real improvements all the time.
None of this is inane, or un-workable. It all works just fine, and I sacrifice little in the way of typical american comforts, and use a lot less oil and electricity than the typical american commuter household in the burbs. Your dismissal of all of that as unworkable and simply feel-good just proves my point that Americans will never change until they are forced to by circumstance and many, like you, will taunt and denigrate those who are trying to make positive change. High ideals? No, a simple recipe for survival in an age of less oil and more people around the world competing for it. What is your solution? Well so far, all bluster and military sabre rattling that the world can plainly see that we can't back up without resorting to nukes. Which you are apparently ready to do.
None of those changes would just be "nice". 50 MPG cars aren't just pie in the sky, they have been possible for decades and to have used more of that technology, sooner, would have made a real contribution to the national security you claim to be so concerned about. Instead, you mock the very idea of energy conseration, while being held hostage to a hornets nest of politics in the middle east that inevitably led us into a protracted, messy war. A war which didn't need to happen if we had taken the oil embargo of the seventies as the serious wake up call that it was.
All do-able and all real world. Americans in general and you specifically seem to lack the imagination to see just how do-able it really is. And for that, we will pay and pay and pay and then ultimately run out of oil (or oxygen, whichever comes first) anyway. What a waste!
.......JK
