Yes - I just bookmarked cellar.org/iotd when I originally found the site, looking for pictures of the "purple polar bear" a few years ago. So when I look at it I get the image right off the bat. Sometimes it can be a jolt. I'm using a laptop - do you have any idea how hard it is to clean barf out of a laptop keyboard?!?
Yeah, from a very quick glance, self.org has sort of the right idea. I don't know anything about them or what their agenda is. I'm older, so I lok at it from a 1970's Mother Earth News angle. But the technology exists to wean a lot of the world demand of oil. I just hope the USA can switch away in time, before the press of events forces it on us in a painful and possibly fatal way to our nation and our characteristic culture. SF writers such as Lester Del Rey and Robert Heinlein have been predicting this sort of thing since about 1940 - and 67 years later we're still sliding towards oblivion. As Heinlein himself put it, we're "Too fat, dumb and happy", like the Romans watching the Visigoths (or whoever it was that sacked the city) approach the city in 410 AD and doing nothing. We've been sitting back doing basically nothing since 1973 - 34 years now!! - while our hard-earned treasure gets shipped overseas to enrich regimes which do not like us or are actively hostile to us. Now look at the mess we're in, basically over oil. How much longer can we go on?
Heinlein makes a very very good point in his short story THE ROADS MUST ROLL (1940). Every tank, jeep, airplane and every ship except subs and aircraft carriers run on oil. If a big war breaks out, oil will be a military priority, just as it was in WW2. The difference is, most folks live in suburbs now, not in the towns themselves as most of them did in 1941. Commute distances are many times what they were in 1941. Streetcar lines, interurban trolley lines and passenger trains are basically extinct now. If we can't get gas, how do we get to work? If we can't get to work, where does our country end up?
Now, we're going to be competing with China and India, the awakening economic giants, for Middle East oil. Great - just what we need. That'll be what kicks off the next big war, I suspect about 2020 or so. Time to get out of importing oil while the getting out's good.
Setting a good example for the world is supposed to be the USA's *JOB*, for heaven's sake. Cutting CO2 emissions can't hurt anything. And we can still make some nice low and medium-tech jobs manufacturing and selling alternate energy technology, and making some export bucks would be really nice these days!
And I do like Thomas Freidman's term for countries, like Nigeria, Saudi arabia, etc. that are rich in natural resources and yet the money never ends up enriching the majority of people - "Kleptocracies".