Any oil we don't burn will be burnt by China, India, for example.

Carbon emissions are global. If we cut back, we help.

Your notion has been stripped clean of any substance a thousand times before. Cling to it if you please. You have lots of company.

This is your only argument -- make it count. You get the last word.

As a matter of fact, we are one of - if not the - largest producers of fossil fuels in the world. If we stopped overnight, we'd reduce supply and thus, by-products like carbon emissions.

Use would certainly go down when it plunges the US into a great recession.

Start by turning off your computer.

In the original Kyoto Protocols, they simply wanted to roll back CO₂ levels to 15-20 years previous. Not eliminate the carbon industry.

I am a HUGE advocate for controlling human contributions to climate change, but eliminating the "carbon industry" borders on totally insane and is unnecessary.

contrarian view (not my personal view), but what happens if we impoverish the industry?
What about the thousands and thousands of people that this would put out of work?
They have bills, children to raise, lives to live. What happens to them?

The carbon industry fuels the world. Carbon needs to be replaced as much as possible, but the proposal in the OP is illogical and unnecessary.

love the concept of "Mankind as a whole" or "The masses" or "The common good"
but don't actually like real people, or how their policies/agenda affect actual individuals.
I am sure that not one of the tens of millions of people
that you mentioned would willingly trade their families and lively hood for someones else's "ideals"

I mean sure, it sounds good to stand against slavery, but what about the people who lose income?
Does anyone think of them? Rarely, if ever. Damn idealists!!

... it's those fossil fuel power plants, automobiles, airplanes, and container ships that will destroy this civilization. (The fossil fueled war machines are simply frosting on that cake.)

But we humans seem to be incapable of recognizing those kinds of threats until they overwhelm us.

DU's own GliderGuider, frequently posting in the Environment and Energy group, is the resident philospher here on that subject.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112786554

"Could we have avoided this? Sure! But only if all of the following were true:
•Our brains did not cause us to seek out novelty and its rewards;

•We evolved to fear the lion across the valley more than the lion behind that next bush;

•We evolved not as social animals like chimps or wolves, but as leaderless "natural anarchists" - say more like flocks of pigeons;

•We were uninterested in solving complex problems, were content to simply live in the landscape we found ourselves in, and not interested in improving anything; and

•There were no fossil fuels on Earth."

"As humans", what have we been "overwhelmed" by in the past that we "as humans" refused to recognize?

... the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II.

Look how many prominent U.S. Americans respected the Nazis because they were putting Germany back together again after the chaos of the Great War and Depression.

Good for business!

The people who knew the sky was falling were rejected, denied, or ignored by larger society.

mostly on fossil fuel. Any u ilateral action to outlaw fossil fuel could do more harm than good, unintended cosequences come to mind. The changes must be done world wide to have an appreciable effect on global CO2 levels.

at fossil fuels and carbon.

Alternative sources of energy are still too expensive for most. Not everyone has access to geothermal, hydro or wind. It would seem they lose out. They need that cheap abundant energy to grow and eventually transition to something better.

at present trying to build alternatives and in doing so we are using fossil fuels to manufacture the equipment needed to make the change. How are we going to deal with this problem?

It's a hamster wheel, and we're not getting off. We can't.

oil would be used to set up the new system. But instead of doing that we have developed new systems of extraction such as fracking and are still acting as if there is no end to it. Would we still be talking about depletion if we had not decided to frack? Or deep water drill?

Unfortunately I think we will wait until we have created worse problems before we decide that we cannot live by fossil fuels alone.

The very fact that they're fracking is all we need to know regarding the situation with oil depletion -- all the good and easy oil is gone.

1000 years from now there will be no big cities or any type of civilization that we're familiar with. There will be no USS Enterprise or Mars colony. What there will be is the ancient ruins of NYC and Houston, etc., and small bands of humans living in self-sufficient, hunter-gatherer groups who may or may not be using implements left over from what once was.

In other words, once oil is gone, so is technological civilization. And make no mistake, we'll go down with the last barrel of oil, and will not give up oil/fossil fuels a moment sooner.

Other than coal. They're already concentrated. We don't have to spend all that much time and energy to get the energy. Solar, wind, etc, all more diffuse, all require more energy to get the energy to do the work.

How many billion deaths are you willing to accept to meet your goal?

Electric cars are not the perfect solution. Where does somebody in an apartment complex charge an electric car. Our electric grid can not handle 75 million electric cars anyway.

I have a natural gas furnace in my home (only a few years old). Who is going to pay to replace that?

Heating with (coal) electricity is already 50% more expensive than heating with natural gas. If electricity prices double, then I guess I can expect a few 700 dollar a month power bills. But at least I won't be home much since I'll be walking to work.

sell the horse to a glue factory, and use the buggy as tinder tomorrow evening? Ridiculousness.

Signed,

A Luddite Who Would Be Surprised to Learn that in 20 years, that is exactly what he should have been thinking to do.

Not because one person wrote an article in the paper aayong it was the right thing to do.

Mm-hmmm. I'm sorry if your personal energy investments would nosedive, but that's not our problem.

Since it will never happen, we'll just keep spewing out carbon until industrial society collapses.

We are now on a collision course between neoliberal capitalism and the fate of the human race.

The ridiculous thing about it all is that it would not be difficult to plan for a near-total switch to renewables over a period of 25 years. The technology is there already and will only get better. The corruption of the system prevents even the first step from being taken.

I can't begin to summarize Klein's brilliant book in a post here, so go read it.