Can Technology Save the Planet ?  

I've been a fan of Bruce Sterling since I read his early cyberpunk book Schismatrix as a teenager, which you may have deduced given my frequent quoting of various Viridian sources (the fan bit at least, unless you are exceptionally perspicacious). My tendency towards faith in Viridian solutions to peak oil is probably the main difference between me and my co-franchisee at Peak Energy (America).

Bruce has a good article up at the Sierra Club outlining his vision for the future
(via WorldChanging - who also have the audio for Bruce and Alex Steffen's keynote speech at the SXSW conference which also goes over a lot of the issues involved in dealing with fossil fuel depletion and other challenges).

Even our civilization's death grip on creaky old fossil fuels is loosening. Already, major European oil companies are perfectly capable of talking sense: BP sincerely hungers to be "Beyond Petroleum," while the honcho at Shell, an outfit chastened by fraud allegations, rides a folding bike to work and uses fluorescent bulbs at home. ExxonMobil posts the biggest profits in the world, but that's not a sign of health and good management; it's a sign of reckless mania.

A clever environmental campaign would explain to the rich how much they are suffering at the hands of old tech. A wealthy American with an environmentally caused cancer has the same bio-accumulative toxic burden as the rest of us; the ultimate environmental reality show would be something like Wrecked Florida Beach Homes of the Rich and Famous. Extend that metaphor to other groups that don't easily embrace environmental messages and you can show fundamentalist churches ripped to shreds by F4 tornadoes, or Sagebrush Rebellion ranchers who haven't seen a drop of rain in months. People understand suffering once it's divorced from the abstract and imposed on them.