Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

Chapter Seventeen: Achieving Resilience 301just as the state offices were hitting their stride and becoming effective facilitatorsof local action. Without such substitutes as the Energy ManagementPartnership Act (proposed federal legislation which was not enacted), muchof the present capability for coordinating state energy preparedness measures—forboth preventing and responding to energy emergencies 19 —is slated todisappear. Such state efforts, like corresponding ones at county and municipalscale (e.g., in Los Angeles 20 ), should on the contrary be strengthened as acheap way to achieve local goals which also add up to national resilience.Regardless of national or state policies, there is a widespread perception, especiallyamong county and municipal leaders around the country, that when energysupplies are next seriously disrupted—an event which most experts believe isvirtually certain to occur within ten years—federal programs, with the best will inthe world, will not be able to do much for most people. It will be every communityfor itself. The experience described in the rest of this chapter shows that peopleare generally prepared to accept that their best protection against the resultinginconvenience or hardship is to get busy now with what they can do for themselvesto develop efficiency and renewables—not to wait for what others might dofor them many years in the future. This approach responds both to people’s wellfoundedanxieties about energy security and to their equally shrewd suspicionthat there is a great deal they can do to increase their personal and communityenergy security while saving money meanwhile. Such programs can certainly beencouraged and helped by federal and state actions, but their main impetus canonly come from within communities themselves. The rest of the chapter, therefore,discusses the basis and technique of such locally based programs.Why act now?Communities, like people, tend to wait until a crisis is at the door beforetaking a new and unfamiliar direction. Democracies, as the late physicistDennis Gabor remarked, respond magnificently to great dangers but are notso good at responding to smaller, creeping dangers. Energy, however, maywell be different, because relatively small interruptions of supply—gasolinelines, natural gas shortages, regional blackouts—should already have preparedAmericans psychologically to understand the vulnerabilities described in thisbook, and because the economic burdens of buying energy are visible daily.If those two reasons do not goad communities into action, it may be too late:options that exist before a major failure of energy supply rapidly vanish duringit, because of uncertainty, capital shortages, and hardware shortages.Uncertainty In an energy shortage, whether from traditionally consideredcauses such as an oil embargo or from the types of system failures on which