Richard Heinberg - Resilient Communities Part 4

Richard Heinberg, author of The Party's Over, Power Down, & Peak Everything, delivers his latest thoughts and strategies for dealing with Peak Oil and Climate Change at the Positive Energy Conference at the Findhorn Ecovillage.

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• Heinberg
• Peak
• Everything
• Oil
• Climate
• Change
• Findhorn
• Community

[Baestaens]

True but there first has to happen something terrible before they will act.

[FindhornFoundation]

That's the worry, will we need another Pearl Harbour or massive stock market crash to galvanise us into action? Is great tragedy the only impetus for great change? All the examples I know (WWII, the depresssion, Cuba's special period, the French Revolution) seem to suggest this to be the case.

But I want to believe that as a human race we have evolved to a point where we can make a difference before people start dying en masse.

Am I naive? I hope not.

[FindhornFoundation]

And having said that, the tragedy has already begun: Iraq, the food riots in Indonesia and Mexico and elsewhere. It just hasn't hit my community yet, or much of the industrial world. How long do we have? Richard gives us 18-24 months before the peak, what then?

[linghun]

This stupid theory has already been tried in Cambodia and Guyana in the 1970s. Good luck with your loony retard communities, you are gonna need it.

[christo930]

Had the US government actually "done nothing" the great depression would have been a 1 or 2 year recession. Price fixing and other things that they tried are what CAUSED the great depression. Primary to popular thinking the new deal didn't help. WW2 is what really lifted us out of the depression. That is why the military was not dismantled like it was at the close of every other war in American history.

[wildkubera]

The new deal was possible because as a net creditor to the world the U.S. could make the money to create infrastructure. In this age as a net debtor will China and the Gulf states willing fund a newer deal? when they too will be in crisis

[Teratornis]

Richard mentions Cuba and the Great Depression as catalysts for sweeping economic and social change by state power. Another example is Pearl Harbor, which eliminated political opposition to the U.S. entry into WWII, and caused the U.S. to shift almost all industry from civilian production to war production virtually overnight. The U.S. needs to do that right now, so we can build a million large wind turbines and all the other renewable energy stuff.