We - and by this I mean people throughout the industrial world - have to make the transition to a Third World lifestyle. There's no way to sugar-coat that very unpalatable reality. Fossil fuels made it possible for most people in the industrial world to have a lifestyle that doesn't depend on hard physical labor, and to wallow in a flood of mostly unnecessary consumer goods and services. As fossil fuels deplete, all that will inevitably go away. How many people would be willing to listen to such a suggestion? More to the point, how many people would vote for a politician or a party who proposed to bring on these changes deliberately, now, in order to prevent total disaster later on?

John Kenneth Galbraith has written a brilliant, mordant book, The Culture of Contentment, about the reasons why America is incapable of constructive change. He compares today's American political class (those people who vote and involve themselves in politics) to the French aristocracy before the Revolution. Everybody knew that the situation was insupportable, and that eventually there would be an explosion, but the immediate costs of doing something about it were so unpalatable that everyone decided to do nothing and hope that things would somehow work out. We're in exactly the same situation here and now.

All trendy hippie greens assume that we can continue living this lifestyle, as long as we buy the right green products and demonstrate for world peace on sundays. Here's a wake-up call for ya'll: it won't work. We need to live a much more simple lifestyle, and how simple will depend on how many people we are on this planet. As we've mentioned before, It's impossible to offer an industrial lifestyle for 6,6+ billion people, even so for the number of people currently living in the West. If we don't change our lifestyle, AIDS, hurricanes, ice ages, and viruses will take care of the rest.