If you follow energy and environmental news closely, you probably have noticed how dire things are sounding lately. Beyond the immediate, financial problems many consumers in industrialized countries are facing thanks to higher gasoline prices, there’s more than a little cause for concern, including:

• The evidence keeps piling up that not only is global warming happening faster than anyone[1] predicted, but that it could trigger some truly horrific scenarios, number one on my personal nightmare hit parade being a massive methane release leading to a runaway greenhouse effect.
• So far we’re seeing a stunning lack of reasonable public policy responses to peak oil and global warming, in particular. “Developed” and “developing” nations keep pointing fingers at each other over CO2 emissions, US politicians are still yammering on about “achieving energy independence”[2], and the deniers and delayers score victory after victory by valuing their own political ideology above science and in the process making it that much harder for us to act in our own collective best interest.
• Ocean acidification and overfishing
• Drought conditions becoming more prevalent around the world, impacting agriculture, drinking and sanitation water, and our ability to generate electricity with existing hydroelectric and thermoelectric plants.
• Food shortages and disease outbreaks, which will only get worse with global warming.
• The projections of 9 billion human beings living on our planet in just a few decades sound less like a demographic analysis and more like a recipe for unmitigated catastrophe every day. Not that anyone but the crazy people ever talks about the issue of human population; it’s simply too crass or personal or whatever a topic for our tender sensibilities.
• Perhaps worst of all is the breathtaking indifference to all these issues we see in mainstream consumers and voters. Energy and environmental concerns are seen as nothing more than yet another total immersion hobby that’s fostered by the Internet, just another form of pornography like college basketball, chess, gardening, antique cars, science fiction fandom, or, well, pornography. I can barely guess how many people I’ve talked to about these issues and warned in no uncertain terms that The End Of Cheap Oil Was Upon Us, only to see them buy one or more vehicles or move to a location that locked them into a stupendously bad situation for years. How bad will things have to get before people internalize the fact that there’s a connection, complete with painful consequences for bad decisions, between these “abstract” energy and environmental issues and reality?

Sadly, I can’t convince myself that I’m alone in seeing such a mounting list of problems. For example, this September, ABC (US) will air a two-hour special, Scientists From Around the Globe Join ABC News in a Forum on Surviving the Century:

Are we living in the last century of our civilization? Is it possible that all of our technology, knowledge and wealth cannot save us from ourselves? Could our society actually be heading towards collapse?

According to many of the world’s top scientists, the answer is yes, unless we take action now.

This September, in Earth 2100, a dramatic ABC News 2-hour broadcast, the greatest minds across the globe will join together in a countdown to the year 2100 to tell us what we must do to survive the next century … And what may happen if we don’t.

The time to act is now, says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute.

“The 21st century is going to be the century which determine[s] whether we live or die as a sustainable species,” Gleick said. “As populations grow, as our use of resources grows, I think we get closer and closer to that edge.”

Experts say that extreme changes in climate, combined with dwindling resources, famine, war and disease have the potential to create a post-apocalyptic world in less than a hundred years. Harvard University and Woods Hole climatologist John Holdrens says we cannot continue going down the same path.

“If we continue on business as usual, we are going to see more floods, more droughts, more heat waves, more wildfires, more ice melting, faster sea level rise,” Holdren said.

“We really have less than a decade to start getting this right. If we’re still dragging our feet in 2015 I think it really becomes at that point almost impossible for the world to avert a degree of climate change that we simply will not be able to manage without intolerable cost and consequences.”

As a trained economist, I’m strongly inclined to be a contrarian and look for the other side of the issue. Won’t we see higher prices signal economies–local, national, and world–to seek a new equilibrium point? Won’t we find ways to make better use of existing technology and invent hew solutions, some technological, some “merely” in the business arena?[3]

Yes, of course we’ll see such things, and we’re seeing them already. GM and Ford are shutting down truck plants or converting them to produce cars, US drivers are driving less and buying smaller cars in droves, and people are increasingly accepting the science behind global warming, albeit with some truly perverse exceptions. You can probably add your own list of adaptations from the large to the trivial.

So, the question isn’t will we make changes when kicked repeated by the mule that is higher market prices, but can we summon the will to make them fast enough? Can we conserve oil quicker than the supply declines post peak? Can we impose enough of a price penalty on CO2 emissions, even with rising energy prices, that we reduce them to 80% below 1990’s level by 2050? Or have we locked our children, including my three nieces and all of our children[4], into an unprecedented struggle for life?

Put another way–now that we’ve created these situations and waited so long to deal with them that convenient or comfortable solutions are no longer possible, can we do the equivalent of pulling an all-nighter and passing our final exam?

For the first time in my life I’m not sure how to answer that question.

[1] By “anyone” I mean “anyone who has a freakin’ clue”, which excludes the misanthropic doomers on the ‘net who see disaster in the pattern of Cheerios in their cereal bowl every morning, as well as the money men we see propped up on business channel telecasts telling us how the magic of the market will make it all better, even as it (surprise!) makes the money men richer. The clueful category includes the real scientists, like James Hansen and the good people over at RealClimate.org.

[2] Which has about the same probability of happening during our lifetime as flying monkeys coming out of the next president’s butt live on a televised press conference.

[3] My favorite example of a business breakthrough is the PPA (power producer agreement) for solar panels. These are the arrangements where you agree to buy your electricity from a company for X years at Y cents per kWh, and they install solar panels on your house or business. The own the equipment and are responsible for repairs, etc., so you don’t have any large up-front costs. This very neatly gets around the very sizable barrier to entry for many consumers in adopting solar PV.

[4] When I talk about “fixing things for the children”, I get that look from people, and I get some amazingly rude e-mail. I no longer care. As I’ve said in presentations and on this site, the children of the world belong to all of us, no matter whose DNA they carry. That’s my motivation, pure and simple. If human beings suddenly went sterile and those of us already here were the last ones ever born, then I wouldn’t care about any of these issues I write about nearly every day. After the last of us died off the planet and nature would recover just fine.