I enjoy work on effective strategies for change, and exchange good information about better tech and ways of living. And I can do some good at the same time. I learn new things, I can inform other people, and I can do just a little bit to move all of us towards a better world, with less pollution, Climate Change and oil-induced terrorism.
I like to counter the strain of anti-renewable, anti-EV, anti-tech thought in environmentalism which is counter-productive. It either makes advocates of change less credible or provides ammunition for "drill, baby, drill". Similarly, people saying unrealistic things about economic collapse, fiat currencies, etc, hurts the credibility of people who are trying to make things better, and it diverts people's time and energy away from more productive ideas.
"Problems in the larger society can hurt me and my family, bad, and I can't trust the newspaper to warn me about them ahead of time. I've also learnt - also the hard way - that you can get just as misled from uncritically accepting lefty-enviro groupthink as you can from uncritically accepting righty-corporate propaganda. There are just as many overreactive alarmists out there as there are optimistic apologists, and basing decisions on either of those poles is apt to get us in trouble.
So I think for myself, and I read copiously from as many points on the ideological spectrum as seem to at least be making an effort at honest analysis, and as many different academic disciplines as seem relevant, and I try to be as unbiased and data-driven as I can.
And I put it up here because, in no particular order, it may be helpful to others, it gives me a convenient way to find my own past thoughts and researches, I get useful feedback and links and references from others, and finally, at the psychosocial level, I can definitely use the attention, and even the occasional friend, that comes out of it."*
I think that we face some serious challenges. Peak Oil is a serious problem, but something that we can solve fairly easily, once we really put our minds to it - the technical solutions are all here, and it's a problem that is in our control. On the other hand....Climate Change is harder. The solutions exist, but they require larger changes to society. Worse, there is a significant chance that positive feedbacks in the physical world that are out of our control will intervene, and make climate change spiral into a disaster. At that point neither prevention nor cure would work - we could only adapt, or experiment with climate engineering which would be dangerous, and likely only offer partial solutions.
The solutions to Peak Oil and Climate Change are similar, but Climate Change demands that we make changes faster, and deeper. I hope we do the right thing...
*I borrowed the foregoing from Stuart Saniford, as it expressed my perspective perfectly.
