Ten years ago, energy expert Amory Lovins predicted that by 2010 hybrid and fuel cell cars would make up between half and 2/3rds of all the vehicles in the US. Today, no fuel-cell are on the U.S. market, hybrids are well under 5% and the efficiency of the US transportation fleet isn‘t much higher in 2009 than it was in 1989. Lovins has long been respected as one of the most optimistic proponents of technological solutions to the crisis of industrial civilization: the idea that we’ll innovate our way out of this mess and continue our extractive economy, just with shiny solar panels to pay homage to the notion that we value the environment.

John Michael Greer adds his commentary to the Lovins v Andrews issue and extrapolates that trend to all the super technologies that will save us that are ‘just around the corner’. The key point being that we are mostly stuck with what we’ve got because nearly all our surplus resources are committed to maintaining the current technological and social order and that those surplus resources are largely gone,

Those specific reasons can be usefully subordinated to a more general point, which is that airy optimism about technologies that haven’t yet gotten off the drawing board is not a useful response to an imminent crisis in the real world. This is a point worth keeping in mind, because airy optimism about technologies that haven’t yet gotten off the drawing board is flying thick and fast just now, especially but not only in the peak oil scene. Mention that industrial society is in deep trouble as a result of its total dependence on rapidly depleting fossil fuels, in particular, and you can count on a flurry of claims that Bussard reactors, or algal biodiesel, or fourth generation fission plants, or whatever the currently popular deus ex machina happens to be, will inevitably show up in time and save the day.

One of the things that has to be grasped to make sense of our predicament is that this isn’t going to happen. Some of the reasons that it’s not going to happen differ from case to case, though all of the examples I’ve just given happen to share the common difficulty of crippling problems with net energy. Any attempt at a large-scale solution at this point in the curve of decline faces another predictable problem, though, which was discussed back in 1973 in The Limits to Growth: once industrial civilization runs up against hard planetary limits, as it now has, the surplus of resources that might have permitted a large-scale solution are already fully committed to meeting existing urgent needs, and can’t be diverted to new projects on any scale without imposing crippling dislocations on an economy and a society that are already under severe strain.

[Read the full post at The Archdruid Report]