Generally speaking, I believe most of the building blocks of an alternative, decentralized and less energy-guzzling economy are already out there and ready to adopt. As Amory Lovins et al argued in Natural Capitalism , the main thing holding it back is cultural inertia and path dependency. When energy prices get high enough, they’ll overcome that inertia. And according to Lovins et al, just the low-hanging fruit (things like replacing trucks with trains, cogenerating power from industrial wa