Calvin Sloan

Sounding the alarm early is far better than not sounding the alarm at all. In fact, those who do are the true pioneers of ecological conciousness. Heinberg may be early, or he may not be, yet he has engaged us all in a very necessary conversation, arguably the most important conversation my generation will have in our lifetimes.

I think we can solve this problem. If we look at it from an engineering or technical perspective, we have solutions in hand that we can build out in the next decade that would reduce our carbon dramatically. We could double our nuclear, we could double our natural gas for electric power, ramp up wind and solar dramatically while cutting back our coal use 80 percent…Just because we could do it as engineers with off-the-shelf technology that exists today within a decade does not mean that the policy, economic, or cultural hurtles are not real.

The question shouldn’t be when can you predict all of this is going to fall apart; it’s a recognition that it inevitably will fall apart, and we either prepare for it, in both physical terms, but also I think in moral terms.