The real problem is that we use too much oil. It's that simple and that difficult. If we truly want to reduce our vulnerability to high prices, the best way to do so is to reduce consumption.

What's new is high oil prices and the economy hates high oil prices.

The science is in: either we go cold turkey on our coal, oil, and gas addictions, or we risk raising the planet's temperature to a level incompatible with the continued existence of civilization.

Surveying the available alternative energy sources for criteria such as energy density, environmental impacts, reliance on depleting raw materials, intermittency versus constancy of supply, and the percentage of energy returned on the energy invested in energy production, none currently appears capable of perpetuating this kind of society.

The idea that we industrialized humans are immune to the natural laws that have restrained growth in other species-and humans in past social regimes-is to me so self-servingly blind as to be morally reprehensible.

It is possible to point to hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of imaginative, courageous programs to reduce, recycle, and reuse - yet the overall trajectory of industrial civilization remains relatively unchanged.

When we decline to talk about what is real simply because it's uncomfortable to do so, we seal our own fate.