Dear Bret— 

The shame of reading this for the first time on an airplane!

(I respectfully disagree with Saul: the more I travel, the more I video conference, and the more I video conference the more I travel. It’s a vicious cycle.)

I don’t think this will be useful for you. I’m not even sure if it will lead you to smile or despair, but I’m hoping for the former:

You had so many references that I made a toy web browser to automatically open all of the hyperlinks as I read. Here’s a short screencast:

Oh! There’s one usable thing. You have a dead link to Ten Brighter Ideas (a missing “t,” see 01:39). 

Beyond that, I liked getting a “feel” for the sources underlying your claims, and I also read quite a few of them. You have more than 150 links, and I was curious if they could do more than scare away would-be critics/doubters. At first skim, the amount of design and gloss on the right-hand column is a little overwhelming. (Especially so in contrast to the lack of coherent political design around climate change.) You get at our bibliographic crisis in the “Literacy and standards” section.

In general, I found the high-level structure excellent and very much focused around the title question. I felt a little tension between the “concerted global effort comparable to World War II” and a tone that’s otherwise more incremental/optimization-focused (is that the tone you were attempting?). I don’t think a world war feels like slightly refracted life-patterns ("what I'd mostly like to focus on here isn't consuming less energy so much as consuming energy differently”) and tech-systems. 

This is an out-of-left-field comment, but I had a little pang of fear that there’s almost too much about the positive externalities of peripheral technological progress, without much to guide the reader in what might be a negative use of her technical prowess. Is it really the case that anything that makes something more efficient will help us out of our climate hole? I don’t think that’s what you’re trying to say, but wonder if a little more acknowledgement that technology has gotten us into this mess—that it’s not all good—would be beneficial. Hydraulic fracking comes to mind (I think its techno-development had been one of the biggest price-competitors to renewables), but I don’t really know what I’m talking about here… 

It seems like the section on model-based thinking is still waiting for a (maybe interactive) introduction, so perhaps this comment will be moot, but I wish we had a good example of model-based thinking having a demonstrable political effect. A few weeks ago, Bryan Newbold told me about an urban planning tool called streetmix for model-based urban planning thinking, which seems to have had some interesting political uses. Haven’t looked into it too closely, but it might be a nice shoutout to the humble bicycle, to technical people engaging with politics, as well as to model-based thinking.

Your correspondent,

R.M.O.