Recently I read “Twilight in the Desert,” a book about the advent of peak oil production in Saudi Arabia and watched two good documentaries from Netflix, “The End of Suburbia,” and “A Crude Awakening.” I'm persuaded in part by these items that nothing effective is going to be done to even slow down global warming. It's human nature to want a less laborious life and use our big brains to release chemical energy to produce products to make life “easier.” Neither China, nor India with their coal reserves, nor the U.S. will seriously slow use of these resources. So we need to prepare for a future in which very dire predictions of global warming come true, such as the melting of the Greenland ice cap and an 8 meter sea rise will occur. The Erie area will have a significantly warmer climate like that of Alabama in one scenario. But it will rain to flood depth much more frequently. Population growth in the south will have come to a halt and people retreating from shrinking coasts and dessicated southern areas will be re-concentration in this part of the country.

Of course the powerful nations will loot the powerless and the rich will get their governments to make the poor bear as much of the cost as possible. But globalization is on a collision course with peak oil or plateau-reaching oil production. It will be the perfect storm: just as the United States completes de-industrialization in about 30 years, externalities of production in China, India, and elsewhere, including pollution-induced illnesses, and the cost of transportation will make imports from these countries as expensive or more expensive than American made ones, if they exist at all. Nuclear powered electrolysis to generate hydrogen and coal gasification for cars seem to have insuperable EROEI deficits (energy return on energy invested,) as well as pollution problems, even if scientific work on them continues for 30 years.

Yet Growth Ideology continues to produce maladaptive responses such as war to get control of remaining oil supplies and the building of transportation – related projects. In Erie I would cite the Convention Center and runway extension as examples. Just as airlines are cutting flights, Erie leaders seek $80.5 million to extend the runway. I think 30 years from now there won't be any jet fuel available to make air transportation of either people or cargo to Erie economical. As a transitional project, Pennsylvania needs to resurrect its railroads. “Go local” will have to become the watchword. Just to cope with local climate change, we need to study the feasibility of a kind of institution that hardly exists yet. The closest thing to it is the regional storm water utility that we see emerging in a couple or states in the far northwest. However, such utilities will need a comprehensive water management mission including not merely flood and runoff control, but water quality and storage issues. There's plenty of genuinely future-oriented, adaptive uses for money being spent dubiously or clearly wastefully on convention centers and runway extensions. It's unfortunate local political leaders are infected with Growth ideology and have no clear idea of the future that awaits us under the combination of globalization, climate change and peak oil.

What do others think?