Sexy Dancing vs. Peak Oil: Oily Cassandra

We might file this one under 'missed opportunity'...

It may be sad but it's true - sex sells. We've seen this ourselves in the popularity of our guide on How to Green Your Sex Life, or Solar Powered Bikinis, so 'Oily Cassandra' might very well be on to something in her attempts to educate the masses on the threat of peak oil (imagine if Al Gore had donned lingerie!). Whether or not folks agree with the medium, the message that we need to pay attention to dwindling oil supplies, and fast, is hugely important. Nevertheless, we're dissapointed at how fast Cassandra swings from awareness raising to defeatism, at least where certain alternatives are concerned. Sure, peak oil is likely to bring us some very tough times ahead - as Jeremy Leggett recently argued, we need to be mobilising as if for war - but to simply say we blew our chance to invest in renewables is not helpful. We are hardly short of options, both technological and societal, when it comes to cutting down on oil use fast, and it would have been nice to see Cassandra inspiring action rather than despair in her video. Here's just a short list of what we might have included (maybe we'll make a video of our own to highlight them...):

• community-led transition initiatives
• kite powered shipping
• backyard permaculture
• urban aquaponics
• local farming systems
• bikes, cargo bikes, electric bikes, electric scooters, electric cars, and electric trucks
• telecommuting
• new urbanism
• trains
• vegetarianism and reduced meat diets
• algae and waste grease for biofuels
• community gardens
• DIY hydroponics
• Freecycle
• car sharing
• airships
• micro- , macro- and bloody-massive-scale wind turbines
• solar power to power a house or to power the world

You get the picture - sure, some of these alternatives will never come to pass, and we may well have some major struggles ahead, but sexy dancing or not, we're much more likely to succeed if we inspire change, not instill fear. To be fair, Cassandra's own site does include some very sensible options for adapting, but like many in the peak oil community, she seems to reject the idea of almost any solution that smacks of a techno fix. Given that the fate of billions of people rest on us finding a way out of the mess we've created, we'd like to keep our options open.

::Oily Cassandra ::via YouTube::