[Tinordi]

Originally Posted by Mr.Coffee

Can anybody explain what the alternative is for our society to abruptly depart from the use of hydrocarbons?

There is no one alternative less of a silver bullet more like silver buckshot. And we don't necessarily need to turn away from them on a dime, we still have about 3 or 4 decades of determined transition away from fossil fuels where we consume about 60 to 80% less than we do now. Sure it's a huge task but it isn't insurmountable.

Tinordi? You have decent arguments to Old Dutch but what's the alternative? How do we shift society and everything that this current energy mix contributes to the fabric of our day-day life?

It's just a huge range of alternatives. And there is no real best optimal pathway. Ultimately what needs to happen is that the politics need to change for us to actually get anywhere. We need to make it acceptable to invest significant amounts of money in research and developent to make these technologies significantly cheaper and better performing. We also need to swallow down those costs of fossil fuel use that we aren't paying for through stuff like carbon pricing. Above all we need to reward politicians who act on climate and punish politicians who don't. And we need to accept the inevitable inconvenience of action.

What does this mean? Well the City of Calgary urbanisation agenda rings well here. Many of the drivers of fossil fuel use are decisions being made outside of the traditionally defined realm of energy system actors such as utilities and energy ministries and energy companies. Stuff like vehicle dependent city design has an important effect in making people drive. Therefore we can design cities that do not promote so much vehicle use. We can stop making freeways and make toll ways, we can densify. All of this will be an inconvenience to our current way of thinking about ourselves in the world but I would argue it's necessary and after the inconvenience is gotten over we'd see that it would be a better system to live in anyways.

Seems pretty impossible to me. Shift from gasoline, still need asphalt for roads. Shift to alternate methods of transportation that don't require hydrocarbons, still need plastics, fertilizers, certain petrochemicals.

Thing with asphalt is that you don't burn those fossil fuels you sequester them in a physical format. But yes, there are some very resilient GHG emissions, thankfully the easier ones to substitute are energy based emissions. But if all we used fossil fuels for was to make plastics, asphalt and some steel then we'd be below planetary thresholds to avoid the worst of climate change.

And while your premise that the argument that "coal is worse" is a hollow argument- and I overall agree with you, why aren't those industries the focus of environmentalists too? Why can't both be? Why aren't they shut down too? They are contributing to CO2 levels significantly.

Environmentalists are focusing on coal and are having success in doing so. Every new coal export terminal planned in the U.S. has been scuttled. The last feasible option is through Vancouver where there is a strong anti-coal port movement. It's important not to blame environmentalists for our problems of inaction here. Blaming environmentalists is like saying "we've failed on climate change because environmentalists haven't convinced me to stop driving so much." Environmentalists are a reaction to the problem not a cause of the problem.

Also I'm not certain it's so "out there" that US interests and profitability is protected by charitable donations to First Nations and environmentalist groups to protest pipelines and delay alternate distribution markets which would lead to rising prices for those companies. That isn't really an "out there" theory.

That is out there. It makes no sense. U.S. energy companies aren't donating to the Rockefeller foundation to put them at a competitive advantage. This is just branch plant psychology of a long subservient Canadian psyche. Utterly depedent on the U.S. for gain and completely willing to blame once we #### things up.

First Nations are opposed to oil sands because they don't like them. Not because some U.S. Foundation is telling them not to like them.

There's so many ways to attack this ridiculous conspiracy theory. If the U.S. energy companies are so keen to stick it to Canada then why are the Republicans so hell bent on seeing Keystone passed? Energy companies donate to the Republicans more than the Democrats and Republican consituencies love the U.S. energy industry. U.S. industry wants keystone, bottom line. There are some bit players in the Bakken that may want Keystone to fail but up until two years ago they were nothing and certainly not organized enough to start an 8 year old campaign to stop the oilsands.

It's effing ridiculous, take off the tin foil hat.