Would it be a waste to ask if you have any solutions to the problems brought up in this thread? Your viewpoint is quite different than Sol's; could you at least agree with his goals, or perhaps his principles, while offering alternatives to his suggestions?
Sol and I appear to have a fundamental disagreement about what makes something sustainable. This has come up other places as well.
As I understand Sol's views, they base around, "Industrial civilization is fine, we just need to tweak it a little bit to to make it sustainable." Rooftop solar panels, an electric car instead of a gas car, and tax gasoline more to show those pickup drivers.
I tend much more towards, "Industrial civilization has created most of these problems; doing more of what caused the problems is unlikely to fix them." Or, "You're unlikely to be able to buy your way out of a problem that consumer culture has largely created."
Most of the papers I've read talking about transitioning off a carbon economy before we do major damage to the planet indicate that a transition path would have needed to start in the 70s or possibly the early 80s to have any real impact. At this point in time, we've passed the easy transitions, passed the hard transitions, and are well into the "Huh. Well, things are likely to get really interesting here..." period. So, the likely path forward is significant climate change, sea level rise, and we should probably start getting ready for that instead of sticking our heads in the increasingly waterlogged sand.
As I understand things, at this point, it really doesn't matter that much if it's human caused or not. There's a clear trend, there's an utter paralysis of governments in response to it (except flying politicians around the world to go create a lot of non-binding hot air at conferences), and the only things that really seem to have an impact on human carbon emissions are significant economic shocks.
I don't see any government willing to make the changes required, if it comes at the cost of their economy - which it will. At least for a period of time. Unless all nations act together (which never has happened, and I'm confident in saying it never will happen), there is an economic advantage to remaining on carbon fuels longer than other countries. So everyone will, as long as it remains feasible to do so.
If we actually wanted to make meaningful changes, it would require a radical decrease in per capita energy consumption, which isn't a popular thing to suggest. Solar panels and wind turbines are nice, but require huge amounts of energy to build, significant amounts of non-renewable resources, and we seem to have a tendency to produce them in carbon heavy areas (China's factories) and stick them up in places with cleaner energy (say, the Seattle area) and not that much sun. It's good for signaling to your neighbors that you Care(TM), but it's not actually that useful, energy-wise, or carbon-wise. I'd much rather see them produced with clean power and deployed in hellishly sunny areas, even if you have to build some transmission lines or upgrade existing lines to carry the capacity. There's some of that going on, but it's mostly utility scale, which to me, makes much more sense than home scale solar. Unless you want to go off grid entirely, which is as good a way to create a radical drop in energy consumption as anything else.
Basically, I think industrial civilization is no different from any other civilization, except that we found quite the cookie jar of carbon. Civilizations arc through history, rise, fall, and decay. I think evidence shows that ours is past it's peak, and will probably continue to do those things that decaying civilizations do - a ragged stairstepping down of energy reduction and lower standards of living. The US, specifically, is an interesting case because we're doing a damned good impression of most decaying empires with a decent military. The F-35 program and such may help fix this, though, as they're much more useful for enriching military contractors than actually being a viable warplane. It's interesting to compare the development history of, say, the P-51 Mustang (arguably the best all around fighter we built in WW-II, with the prototype flying 6 months after the order was placed) and the F-35 (infinitely expensive, still fundamentally a failure as a fighter).
I don't think there is any sort of easy fix. As a civilization, we've backed ourselves into a nasty little corner. At an individual level, building antifragility into one's life is probably the most useful thing one can do - which, I'd add, I don't think looks like "Put it all in index funds while living in a little apartment on the 32nd story." That's about as fragile as it gets.
Reducing consumption as individuals is helpful, not in that it will really change anything, but in that it will mean you don't get as annoyed when things that were once available become unavailable. To borrow a phrase from an author I rather like, "Collapse now and avoid the rush."
I'm sure some will consider my views unreasonably pessimistic. They might be. Worst case, I angle towards being prepared for this future and live on a few acres with a great view and plenty of my own garden crops. I can think of worse lives. Best case? I'm well situated as a local expert in low energy transportation, heating, cooling, and can make a nice living helping retrofit existing homes to work better as we descend into a lower energy future, build and repair electric bikes, and still eat some damned fine garden crops.
