The ever-methodical J.C. Winnie at After Gutenberg has an outline of how the United States could replace fossil fuels with renewables for transportation needs – and this without a large change in vehicle weight, use patterns, or increases in mass transportation. Add those, and we’d have a plan that would be not only environmentally more palatable, but would substantially increase environmental efficiency. From After Gutenberg:

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most important anthropogenic GHG; and, such anthropogenic emissions unequivocally contribute to

climate change. The rise of CO2 corresponds to

the rise in global temperature and loss of arctic ice mass. Annual carbon emissions grew by about 80% between 1970 and 2004. Coal-fired electric power plants comprise the single biggest source of CO2 emissions in the world. By and large, such admonishments are being ignored by U.S. policy-makers.

While a planetary engineer in Germany, Roland Moesl, envisions saving life as we know it on Planet Earth, a green pundit in America, David Roberts, describes the Syllogism of Doom. Of course, in Germany between 2000 and 2003 their installed PV capacity quadrupled. And, this was while Germany was becoming the world leader in wind development. It is way past time, ‘Merika, to start doing things right.

A good start would be “the most comprehensive and credible report released on wind power by a federal agency in a decade” (and studiously ignored by mainstream media), which indicates how we could achieve 20% wind power by 2030. Yes, 2030 is too late to stop using coal, but as many have observed, no single strategy will suffice. Switching sooner to electric vehicles, strong support for solar and wind energy development, conservation and improved efficiencies can make an earlier contribution than the delayers have programmed us to expect. The growing risk with peak oil is that in their search for alternative fuel, Americans will ignore much more catastrophic change brought on by anthropogenic emissions. The coal and corn zombies must be repulsed.

That’s just an excerpt. Read the rest of this persuasive analysis at Project Gutenberg.

And we’ll pose a question – we’re beginning to notice county and local impediments to renewable installation – and an absence of state mandates to require utilities to buy surplus power back at reasonable rates. If end users installing renewables in grid-tied systems are discouraged from building capacity in excess of their own use, we’re going to have problems.

One alternative is the setting up of local power coooperatives. But we’re leery of solutions that require lots of lawyers and incorporations. As Malcolm Gladwell points out in The Tipping Point, sometimes the tipping point is making things easy.