We are certainly going to tegret all the fossil fuel we wasted driving around in circles and to the mall and back. This essential resourse could have been used more wisely and strategically future generations will.demand to know why we didn't. Coppice wood powered our ancestral world, without chainsaws andctractors narrow diameter wood becomes much more appealing.
Interesting observations and speculations on belief, governance and social cohesion. We will need new stories and new strategies to bind us together. I like the conept of fossil fuel extension technologies rather than replacements. Permaculture has many useful insights to offer, perhaps more than you give credit for, but your point stands, still much further to go. The transition could have been planned for, but it is too damaging to the current paradigm I suspect, its going to be a bumpy ride for sure.
You have neatly captured the gist of the problem, with one major exception. All this is happening as we humans draw close to the end of the current interglacial. Yes, the oceans continue to warm, but that is, for the most part, a legacy of thermal cycling. Takes a long time to warm all that water up, and it will take an equally long time for it to cool down again. But the atmosphere, and land surface temps are a different story. Reduce the amount of received sunlight, and it begins to get cooler rapidly, as anyone who has been in a solar eclipse is aware. With warm oceans and cold air, the fall snows along the Arctic Ocean are getting heavier - a kind of global lake effect snow. One year, perhaps not so long from now, so much snow will fall that it will not all melt off during next summer (at least in all locations). Same thing will happen the year after that, except the summer snows will now be two winters deep in spots, and even less likely to melt all the way. It only takes a very few years of those reinforcing conditions before increasing amounts of the surface of the globe surrounding the polar areas are now snow covered year round. Ice Ages start a lot faster than most can imagine. Once the snow covered Arctic and sub-Arctic regions remain shiny white all summer, they reflect a greater amount of energy back into the sky. And that's low angle sunlight, the least efficient for heating the ground. That drives yet another "get colder" geophysical feedback loop, on top of just the layers of snow on the ground, slowly becoming a sheet of ice. The Ice Ages of the last million years or so have been driven by minute variations in the shape of the Earth's orbit. That's not something we can alter or escape. It's just the way it is. And our extended warm interglacial vacation is coming to an end. Unfortunately for us, it is happening as we seem to be running low on fossil fuels. All leads to even more emphasis on wood as a future human fuel source.
We are certainly going to tegret all the fossil fuel we wasted driving around in circles and to the mall and back. This essential resourse could have been used more wisely and strategically future generations will.demand to know why we didn't. Coppice wood powered our ancestral world, without chainsaws andctractors narrow diameter wood becomes much more appealing.
Interesting observations and speculations on belief, governance and social cohesion. We will need new stories and new strategies to bind us together. I like the conept of fossil fuel extension technologies rather than replacements. Permaculture has many useful insights to offer, perhaps more than you give credit for, but your point stands, still much further to go. The transition could have been planned for, but it is too damaging to the current paradigm I suspect, its going to be a bumpy ride for sure.
You have neatly captured the gist of the problem, with one major exception. All this is happening as we humans draw close to the end of the current interglacial. Yes, the oceans continue to warm, but that is, for the most part, a legacy of thermal cycling. Takes a long time to warm all that water up, and it will take an equally long time for it to cool down again. But the atmosphere, and land surface temps are a different story. Reduce the amount of received sunlight, and it begins to get cooler rapidly, as anyone who has been in a solar eclipse is aware. With warm oceans and cold air, the fall snows along the Arctic Ocean are getting heavier - a kind of global lake effect snow. One year, perhaps not so long from now, so much snow will fall that it will not all melt off during next summer (at least in all locations). Same thing will happen the year after that, except the summer snows will now be two winters deep in spots, and even less likely to melt all the way. It only takes a very few years of those reinforcing conditions before increasing amounts of the surface of the globe surrounding the polar areas are now snow covered year round. Ice Ages start a lot faster than most can imagine. Once the snow covered Arctic and sub-Arctic regions remain shiny white all summer, they reflect a greater amount of energy back into the sky. And that's low angle sunlight, the least efficient for heating the ground. That drives yet another "get colder" geophysical feedback loop, on top of just the layers of snow on the ground, slowly becoming a sheet of ice. The Ice Ages of the last million years or so have been driven by minute variations in the shape of the Earth's orbit. That's not something we can alter or escape. It's just the way it is. And our extended warm interglacial vacation is coming to an end. Unfortunately for us, it is happening as we seem to be running low on fossil fuels. All leads to even more emphasis on wood as a future human fuel source.