POST COLLAPSE

It seems that even Gail entertains some sort of post bottleneck scenario (if only toward showing its gross limitations). :-) But that goes in contradiction to other lessons from her that have sunk in well.

1) A new cheap form of energy--and we tend to downplay what havoc that would cost to non energy resources--would need to use existing infrastructure to be affordable.

2) 8 billion people in a hyper networked industrial civilization don't just go away nicely post collapse, allowing a few hardy, self-sufficient souls to make a go of it. With so large and unprecedented a global population, and so large and complex an economic system, the human mind can't take in what a collapse affecting the heart of the civilization would look  like. So...

3) To have some chance of working, a (relatively) post collapse scenario would have to use the current social, physica (and maybe political) infrastructure that we have now. It would have to look and feel very much like how it does now. People wouldn't abandon cities and go do homesteading in the bush. Not enough bush, for one thing. Since it takes more energy to run a central government (and since it also produces apathy and passivity), government would become much more participatory and local. Individualism would also be tamped down, and groups and "tribes" would need to work together. And since the quality of the land would be critical for the welfare of relatively deindustrialized networks, there would have to be great cooperation as to the welfare of the broader landscape--coasts, fisheries, watersheds, etc. I agree that a lot of scrounging and tinkering would be involved, but it would involve some sort of educational backing, as well as strong local government support.