Yet we in the industrialized world seem astonished that our parents could afford the houses that we cannot.

The economics of sustenance farming in the face of rising population are immediately clear, yet we do not take the general lesson. We still act like we have infinite resources. Our population is still increasing, yet land, water, oil, and every single mineral is finite and running out. A 2007 article in New Scientist discusses this more cogently than anything I’ve ever seen, including the above chart “How Long Will It Last?”

We need to apply the same thinking to energy. I am not talking about running out of oil. The oil will run out, of course, and not before we do tremendous environmental damage — I, for one, am planning on hitting the world’s great beaches sooner rather than later. But when the oil is gone, it’s simply gone. Unlike copper or plastic, energy cannot be recycled in any way (in fact energy is the limiting input in recycling everything else.) We have no choice but to switch to sunlight for our ongoing power needs. And sunlight, like land, will have to be divided smaller and smaller among more and more of us.

I’m currently looking for an apartment in Hong Kong. On my own I can afford about 200 square feet. I saw a place where the Indonesian nannies live; there were six people in this space, crammed into bunk beds barely narrower than the one tiny room. I was shocked, until I realized that I had arrived in the future. It’s not going to get better. We’re already out of space, but soon we will feel the energy pinch. One day soon, electricity, transport, and hot water are going to be just as rationed as real estate (by each of us individually, because of the cost.)

An engineer named Saul Griffith has done the calculations. To meet the current world population’s current energy requirements, we would need to collect the incident sunlight over an area about the size of Australia. That’s a stupendous amount of solar power to build. It will be a very long time before it is built, if ever. More fundamentally, the physical relationship between incident sunlight and land area brings us right back to passing ever-smaller fields to our children. (By the way, nuclear power won’t help: even without building more power plants we will run out uranium some time in the next century. And wind power, wave power etc. are actually solar driven.)

We will never see the easy material affluence of our parents; we have entered the zero-sum game phase of land- and energy-measured wealth where the only way to get more is to take from someone else (as evidenced by the increasing wealth inequality in industrialized countries over the past few decades.) We can no longer teach our children to expect more than their parents. It’s all a lie; barring insane technological shifts or catastrophic population reduction, the future is high density.

The big house of the American Dream, which is also the big house of the aspiring middle-class everywhere in the world, is over.

But only until Friday.

What can and cannot be regulated is in fact heavily regulated. In April 2007 there was a Supreme Court decision called Massachusetts vs. EPA, in which it was decided that the EPA did in fact have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide, because they qualify as “polutants” under the Clean Air Act.

Actually, legally, the EPA now must regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, they still might not; the EPA could take years to draw up the rules, set the standards too low to have any effect, include the same sort of loopholes that we currently drive SUVs through in the fuel efficiency standards, or simply not enforce the resulting regulation.

But at least they’re currently asking for your feedback. They’ve put up a very official-looking page with the sassy title of Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: Regulating Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act, wherein they announce their intention to respond to the court’s decision, and then provide about 600 more pages of material describing what the options might be. Both cars and “stationary sources” are potentially included, but the biggest issue is whether the EPA will set limits on the carbon emissions from newly manufactured cars, much as they already set fuel efficiency requirements. Then they ask for comments.

Anyway, it’s a mouthful. There’s a decent three-page factsheet, if you don’t want to get into the gory details of the full Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. Also included on the web site are six pages of instructions on how to comment. Or, you can do this the easy way:

• If you’re one of those who believe that global warming is real and dangerous and that industry just won’t take care of it without government leadership, you can use the convenient form over at the We Campaign.
• On the other hand, if you take the recent financial meltdown as evidence that business does best when unfettered by communist regulations, and desire as StopTheACLU.com does to “tell them NO on their jobs killing, economy busting plans to stop non-existent global warming,” there’s another convenient form over at StopEPA.

But you better do it soon, because the comment period closes Nov. 28th. Go comment. I bet Chevron already has.

Why? Probably because it includes the narration,

So why are we still stuck with dirty and expensive energy?
Because big oil spends hundreds of millions of dollars to block clean energy.

Instead, ABC aired Chevron commercials during the debate.

Sort of speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Call it confirmation bias, but I take this as a bad sign for the enviroment.

Are we completely powerless here? Probably not. One could take a moment to digg the story, and perhaps also to add your name to the letter that the We Campaign is sending to ABC. They’re hoping to get 100,000 signatures, which seems a very reasonable number. I wonder if they’re going to print them all out and hand deliver that stack of paper… and then smack someone with it. Sadly, this would probably not help them in their actual goal, which is to get the ad aired during next debate.

This may be difficult, because Chevron no doubt has an even bigger stack of paper.

Several friends have written to me about my piece on Gore’s Sustainable Electricity Challenge, trying to answer the question of how you make climate change mitigation sexy. One person argued that it’s all about associations. When people think of oil they need to think of black goo, the agony of war, evildoers and open sores. When they think of sustainability they should imagine pretty young people, green trees, crystal waterfalls and shining futures. This idea of associations is at the core of classic marketing and public relations techniques. Hence, the Biodiesel Hottie.

I mentioned this to a friend and he instantly translated the central meaning: “preventing the collapse of civilization gives me a boner!”

Well, yes. That is sort of what a hot body in biodiesel bling says. From this ridiculousness he argued that real social change had to include deep education at the primary and secondary school level. I agree completely — but we still need marketing, because, near as I can tell, people don’t actually base the vast majority of their opinions on critical thinking. This should not be shocking.

The argument against a clever, targeted public relations campaign to instill a lust for the Right Thing — sustainability — is that marketing sells image, not substance. Education makes people smarter, marketing makes them stupider, and so it’s entirely possible for people to “buy into” the image of sustainability without actually making any difference. We could all be walking around wearing our BIODIESEL baby-Ts, our fair-trade hemp jeans, listening to some fresh new update of Midnight Oil’s classic enviro-hit Beds Are Burning on our recylable greenPods and all the while continuing to drive our fossil-fuel cars to work. (And to live shows, of course.)

Put another way, we don’t want consumers, we want responsible citizens.

And yet, our world is heavily mediated by the messages we receive, because there’s simply too much world for us to figure it all out ourselves. Marketing sustainability is about more than getting 14 year old girls in Burbank to say things like, “oh my god! Carbon emissions are so disgusting!” It is about that, but it’s also about those who consider themselves generally awake, because even intelligent, caring, and otherwise conscious people can’t do an in-depth study of everything.

Our internal worlds are shaped by a mad swarm of “background” attitudes that we acquired without consciously choosing them. Here in California, smoking is generally considered just as gross as global warming. But why? Thirty years ago, it was awfully cool. Did the general public start reading the oncology, cardiology, and epidemiology journals and discover that (oh my god!) cigarettes are actually bad for your health? Of course not. Instead there was a massive public relations campaign to shape our perceptions. Only we called it a “public health” campaign, because no one likes to be told what to think.

This is about cultural context. This is about culture. This is about those associations I mentioned. Education and science and actual, you know, facts are critical, but the symbols we use in setting up the background assumptions of our society are important too. And we badly need new ones. For example I’m pretty sure that “eco-” has to go. “Eco-” has lost it’s original meaning of “ecological.” Now it sort of means “crappier than before” (eco-detergents like vinegar that don’t clean very well) or “inconvenient” (eco-friendly reusable bags that you always forget to bring to the store), or it might mean nothing at all, having become merely a market-speak word like “premium.” I bet it also invokes “hippie ” for a lot of people, and whatever that movement’s lasting cultural influence may have been, for many, many Americans today “hippies” are too closely associated with unshaven deadbeats, scratchy natural fibers, and a weird a-scientific love of hemp

Marketing is not a dark art. It’s just often used for dark things. If we’re serious about changing the way that that those who have not thought closely about sustainability think about sustainability — this would be almost everyone — then we have to understand what tools are available to shape perceptions. Oil has to be gross, sustainable energy has to be hot. Sure, we also need people to know why oil is gross, but that’s not enough.

Am I the only one who thinks it’s insane that the energy companies are still trying to convince us that using more fossil fuels is a good idea?

I suppose I first need to convince you that I’m not insane either. I give you the International Panel on Climate Change 4^th Assessment Report. Scientists and from over 100 countries got together to review the data, and they decided last summer that global warming is real, caused by humans, and will have major sucky consequences. I tend to believe their conclusions not only because of the enormous international agreement on this point, but because their entire review process is open, rigorous, and meticulously public. On the other hand, I feel that the oil companies have — how do I put this delicately? — the largest conflict of interest in human history, when it comes to climate change reporting.

I bet they’re going to tell us that cigarettes are good for us too. Marlboros go great with an SUV.

The oil may be more or less running out, but unfortunately there are still an awful lot of carbon-spewing fossil fuels left in the world. Estimating the exact amounts of natural gas and coal remaining are tricky, partially because the question is complex and partially because — surprise! — oil companies and governments are sitting on much of the required data, but an estimate based on US Energy Information Administration figures says that while there may be only 45 years of oil left, there are 72 years of natural gas and 252 years of coal still in the ground. And then there are the methyl hydrates, methane trapped in ice just under the sea floor, which may provide a few hundred more years of carbon emissions, if test drillings off of Japan validate the extraction technology.

Unfortunately, it’s fairly obvious that simply switching to new types of fossil fuels will be completely disastrous to the global climate. Yet it is clear, from current “energy” industry propaganda, that this is exactly what the oil companies intend to do.

Personally, I don’t get it. The oil is running out; massive new infrastructure and new technologies must be unavoidably developed in order to solve this problem. Why not do the right thing and use this as an opporunity to go sustainable? It might even be a winning move. The great thing about an unsustainable policy is that it can’t last forever — everyone has to go sustainable eventually, and someone is going to get there first.

Probably the reason is simple economics: these companies and governments already own the rights to huge reserves of natural gas (which normally comes with oil) and coal fields. There’s a lot of money to be made there. So I end up agreeing with my friend Sam’s conclusion: the energy companies are going to dig up and help us burn every last kilogram of fossil fuels and dump it all into the atmosphere while Fiji sinks, unless they are actually, decisively, perhaps physically stopped. My money says it’s going to take an all-out, international legislative assault to get them to do so. Requiring them to pay for carbon sequestration equivalent to every kilogram of fuel sold might also be an effective market-based solution.

Obviously, we can’t just instantly stop using fossil fuels. Equally obviously, we the worried but disenfranchised citizens of Earth are only too happy to buy, buy, and keep buying petroleum products. However, that can’t stop until we have alternatives. Judging by their PR campaigns, it seems painfully clear that the big Energy companies are actually just Oil companies, and that they are not going to give us any real options. Worse, the artificially low price of fossil fuel energy (no one is currently paying the externalities, remember) makes it difficult for the fledgling renewable energy sector to develop and compete.

But something has to be done, because I can’t see any reason for this industry to do the right thing all by itself. Put simply, the oil companies have never been your friends, and now they are less your friends than ever. To quote Wayne’s World, if they were an ice cream flavor, they’d be pralines and dick.