A Modest Proposal to Make the Oil and Gas Industry Unnecessary and Irrelevant.

Contents

Are those of us who object to oil and gas leasing on our last remaining undeveloped public lands hypocrites?   Don’t we all use oil and gas? And isn’t the grim reality that we will all continue to need oil and gas for energy and transportation for as far into the future as anyone can see?

Well, actually, no. That “reality” is nothing more than a cynical, self-serving myth promoted by the multinational corporate behemoths with a gigantic financial stake in maintaining our addiction to oil. The truth  is that we have immediately before us a rich and powerful array of existing, proven, carbon-free energy production and transportation technologies.

It is true, of course, that wholesale conversion of our national energy and transportation infrastructures will take time and cost money.   But if we act immediately, deliberately and strategically full carbon-free “sustainability” is easily within our power to achieve within one to two generations.

All  such effort must begin somewhere. For me it will begin in mid-February 2009 with the completion, on the Earth Restoration Portal,  of a fully integrated suite of policy recommendations called “The Renewable Deal.” 

This document is the continuously evolving masterwork of one fantastically capable and dedicated man—Richard Lance Christie—but it skillfully synthesizes the work of hundreds of eminent experts, scholars  and path-breaking researchers.

Plank One of the Renewable Deal  policy portfolio identifies how we can achieve energy security in a post-carbon world, while ten other “planks” concern the equally important—and intimately interrelated—issues of food security, water security, health care, education, transportation systems, ecological restoration, and other features of an“Ecozoic society,” as we call it, borrowing a term coined by philosopher Thomas Berry.

Chapter One of Plank One reviews the many cumulative studies done in the world on how we can build a renewables-based energy system by 2050 that has no fossil fuel inputs, no nuclear inputs, and produces no net greenhouse gases, while generating more quads of energy than are projected to be needed in 2050 by the Energy Information Agency under a no-conservation “business-as-usual” demand scenario,  at a slightly lower cost per quad than we paid in 2003 for the existing system’s output, in 2003 constant dollars. And, this can be done using off-the-shelf 2008 Best Available Technology.    We invite you to examine the facts and to experience a rush of hope and resolve.

You will find the “Renewable Deal” policy portfolio here within the ManyOne Community Portal Service, in the “Earth Restoration Portal”, a communications node for the “Earth Restoration Project.”

The mission of the Earth Restoration Project is to design, build, and implement a comprehensive masterplan for the staged restoration of the foundational life support systems of our planet, at every scale and in every time frame, from months to centuries .   We understand that any master plan must continuously retooled and improved over time to deal with an infinite number of unforeseen contingencies. We understand that planetary restoration MUST be a vast collaboration amongst hundreds or thousands of contributors across borders, oceans, continent s and time.

 The Earth Restoration Portal and Renewable Deal are associated with the international Relocalization Network launched by the PostCarbon Institute. Tim DeChristopher has been active with the Post Carbon Salt Lake relocalization group, and was introduced to the Renewable Deal’s energy plank. Tim’s articles and interviews cogently articulate his conviction—and ours-- that we don’t need to devour the last remnants of our national heritage for fossil energy in the name of national energy security or independence. Instead, we should and can replace our obsolete fossil-fuel-based energy system with the superior current-technology, renewables-based system outlined in the Renewable Deal, permitting the deliberate program of restoration of ecological integrity in the North American ecosystems described in Aspect One of the Renewable Deal to proceed.

Please join us in the Earth Restoration Project and Portal to help launch this important, challenging, and immensely creative collaborative venture.     The great work of the twenty-first century will be the restoration of our planet, and it success require every bit of energy and imagination and that humanity can collectively bring to it.

--Ray Wheeler,  Earth Restoration Project director