I personally think that collapse is coming. If I had to guess I would say 20-30 years out but to be honest, that's a guess. It could be ten years and it could be a hundred. I don't think the system can reform itself. The fundamental question is how we, our children, or our children's children can plan to survive when nemesis follows hubris.

The things you have mentioned are the beginning but I will give you a few more.

1. Collapse isn't the end of the world. As Joseph Tainter pointed out, nutrition for many Romans improved after the fall of Rome. I would add that already nutrition among the poor in Indonesia (at least from what I have seen living here) is better than it is among the poor in the US, so we have already crossed the threshold where collapse makes sense to a large part of the population.

2. Trade locally. Build up local economic ties.

3. Plan on retiring with your kids. Raise them with this in mind. Part of this is inviting your parents or parents-in-law to retire with you so your kids grow up seeing this as normal.

Alternatively we could prepare for failure. The only way to do that is to make sure we have 150 new nuclear power plants built all around the country in the next 10-15 years though. That should be Obama's Manhattan project. Again, there's two outcomes : either we find something better and it's wasted money (that would be great !) or it saves our collective asses, and gives us another 100 years to come up with something better.

If the US army/govt does find a new energy source, it's likely to be a nuclear one (the only real solution to our needs), and our energy problems are over until our grandchildren die.

The first is smelting and materials. You can recycle steel with just electricity (that's a lossy process) but you can't produce it without burning coal. The same goes for copper and most other metals (aluminum is the only exception to my knowledge). If one wants to support exponentially increasing material consumption, that means, supporting exponentially increasing fossil fuel consumption at this point, since we are already way beyond what we can support there by using biomass for reduction smelting.

The second problem is that no matter what you do, if you push for ever-increasing consumption this will have massive environmental costs. We saw what happened at Fukushima and frankly I think the real lesson there is that natural disasters will always have a significant chance to overwhelm human engineering. It's easy to say "well, if they had the newer designs" but I am not aware of any real experience there seeing more recent designs of nuclear power plants go through a massive earthquake and tsunami. At best we can say "well, if we didn't miss something..." but reality is always more complex than our models. So I don't see nuclear as the answer.

The only real way to prepare for failure is to reduce consumption, and if you listen to the macro-economists, that would cause failure.

For exponentially increasing consumption of energy, even without greenhouse gas emissions you have the problem of the second law of thermodynamics, which leads to a warming planet even with a constant atmosphere. Our path is not sustainable and no amount of technological intervention will make it so. The only breakthrough that could possibly matter in that regard would be the development of perpetual motion machines.

Which isn't necessary, because first, the population is no longer increasing exponentially; IIRC the current projection is that world population will level off by about 2050; and second, the amount of material required to accomplish particular things is decreasing as we find new materials and new ways of using them. For example, the structure of cars used to be entirely steel; now much of it is composites, which contain less material and are less energetically expensive to make.

if you listen to the macro-economists, that would cause failure

It depends on which macro-economists you listen to. Some of them understand that increasing wealth does not have to mean increasing consumption of materials or energy.

The problem you run into there is that for a long time the elderly population will be increasing exponentially, and care for the elderly falls on the shoulders of a smaller portion of the population.

> the amount of material required to accomplish particular things is decreasing as we find new materials and new ways of using them.

This would suggest that capita energy consumption of countries with cutting edge technology is well ahead of per capital energy consumption in countries where people have simpler societies and less manufacturing technologies, right? Is that borne out by numbers and evidence?

> Some of them understand that increasing wealth does not have to mean increasing consumption of materials or energy.

Please define "wealth."

Not "for a long time"; for the length of one generation.

This would suggest that capita energy consumption of countries with cutting edge technology is well ahead of per capital energy consumption in countries where people have simpler societies and less manufacturing technologies, right?

No, because per capita energy consumption depends on how wealthy you are as well as how efficient your technology is. What it does suggest is that per capita energy consumption rises more slowly as a function of wealth than one would expect based on your assumptions about increasing use of resources, and that over time, the per capita energy consumption for some fixed level of wealth will get smaller.

Please define "wealth."

The best definition I know of is that wealth is choices: the more things you could choose to do with the resources available to you, the wealthier you are. One could also try to factor in some measure of the quality of the choices; for example, Bill Gates and I can both choose to fly somewhere, but he can choose to fly there on a private jet whereas I can only choose to fly on a commercial airliner. But the key is that nothing requires the resources needed to fly somewhere to be constant; as technology improves, the same goal--such as flying somewhere--can be accomplished with fewer and fewer resources. That means the same level of wealth--the same choices--can be achieved with fewer and fewer resources.

I am not sure that works in practice unless one has a lot of resources going to enforce property rights over intangible assets, and unless those rights are the only growth one expects in the economy. The fact is, I may download and play a computer game as a factor of what you call "wealth" (not my definition btw), but as soon as I want to do anything(like go to the store to buy groceries), I have to use energy and materials to do that.

Similarly for the video game developer, the FTC regulator, or anyone else possibly involved, to show up to work you have the same questions of materials and energy. What you end up with instead is greater demand for less and less useful products because good materials become more and more expensive. That sounds like inflation to me, not an increase in wealth. I think we are already heading down that spiral.

As for a definition of wealth, this may seem old fashioned, but I will paraphrase one of the more insightful definitions I have read:

Humans are dependent on material culture since we can't live without clothing or shelter, and tend to have to prepare food in some way. Wealth at its core is a desirable modification to goods and materials in our environment. Wealth is created when we modify something to make it more useful.

0.025% annual growth is still exponential. You can't demand a constant rate of compounding rate of growth without the problem that this demands exhausting all natural resources.

The rate isn't constant; it's decreasing. That's the point. For example, you say it takes energy and materials to go to the store or go to work; but it takes less per person now than it used to. (One obvious example is that lots of people can telework now because we have the Internet, conference calling, etc.; I do that several times a week, saving a significant chunk of energy and materials.)

Wealth at its core is a desirable modification to goods and materials in our environment.

Which is done for lots of reasons in addition to food, clothing, and shelter. Your definition of wealth is way too narrow. There are plenty of countries where people have food, clothing, and shelter and nothing else. We call those countries "poor" for a reason.

Frankly what happened at Fukushima is over-cautiousness with nuclear power. The stupid fact is that if they hadn't shut down the entire plant, they wouldn't have lost cooling, and we would all have been perfectly fine. Of course, whoever took that decision would have been fired, and skinned alive, allowed to heal, and skinned alive again. I even read at one point that the operators knew this, but followed procedure.

I would also like to say the death toll of Fukushima compares favorably with wind-power related deaths during the same circumstances, and compares insanely favorable compared to fossil-fuel related deaths (some people actually died inspecting a refinery reactor when the wave knocked it over, most are from pipes exploding due to over-pressure. Total is several hundred). Total area rendered inaccessible due to Fukushima also compares favorably compared to area polluted to the point humans can't safely live there any more for fossil fuel plants and refineries.

Coal matters if one is concerned about CO2 emissions if nothing else.

> The stupid fact is that if they hadn't shut down the entire plant, they wouldn't have lost cooling, and we would all have been perfectly fine.

Do we know for sure that containment wasn't lost due to structural damage from the earthquake?

> I would also like to say the death toll of Fukushima compares favorably with wind-power related deaths during the same circumstances...

Is death toll the only factor though? I don't know about you but I think the major impact of Chernobyl of Fukushima will not be, in a hundred years, the death toll but the fact that you have areas of land that are no longer useful for many purposes, like growing food.

All the items you give are good ones; I would add a few more:

* Be skeptical. Much of what passes for "common knowledge" because it is promulgated by the government or the mainstream media is false. Use your own independent judgment.

* Be knowledgeable. You can't use your own independent judgment if you don't understand how things work. Yes, that means you have to spend time and effort learning about things like science or economics on your own, rather than just accepting that whatever you were taught in school is true. (For why you can't just accept that, see "be skeptical" above.)

* When people who are in power make mistakes, particularly large and egregious mistakes, don't let them off the hook. People in power love to make excuses when they screw up. Don't let them. They also like to say that they didn't mean to do anything wrong, but they're human so they make mistakes. Don't let them get away with that either; if you're in a position of power, you should be held to a higher standard than an ordinary person, because your decisions have broader consequences. For an ordinary person, making a bad decision means you learn to do better next time. For a person in power, making a bad decision should very often mean they're no longer in power.

Most of all:

* Don't look at politics as a way of imposing your view of what is right on others. Look at politics as a last resort for people with fundamentally different values to use to figure out how to peacefully coexist without either side imposing its views on the other.