The Need for a Tahoe Inventory

What do humans need to live a sustainable life in the Lake Tahoe region?  Let's start with a simple definition of sustainable: It means capable of enduring for the indefinite future, certainly many decades to centuries.  It means being able to provide for ourselves food, shelter, clothing, some level of medical care, education for young people, transportation to nearby regions.  It also means ways of providing fresh, drinkable water and safely processing wastes; ways of providing energy to heat and light our dwellings, cook and preserve our food; ways to compost or otherwise handle our waste products; ways of repairing places we live and work; ways of defending ourselves from unfriendly persons and any dangerous wildlife.

What about what we have now?  What's wrong with electricity (generated from coal and natural gas), gas for heating, gasoline and cars/trucks/buses for transportation, food from the supermarket, and lots of other stuff from big box stores down in the valleys?   The main thing wrong with these approaches is that none of them are sustainable and all of them will become increasingly expensive and eventually unaffordable for most of the people who hope to live in the Tahoe area.  Then there's the issue of relying on fossil fuels, all of which create further damage to an already deteriorating climate...

Our entire way of life, in Tahoe and the rest of the country, depends on a readily available, uninterrupted supply of fossil fuels, especially products derived from oil, and secondarily from natural gas and coal.  Nuclear power also supplies some of the nation's electric power.  All of these energy sources are fragile in the sense that we are running our of the cheaper supplies and only have the expensive, more dangerous to use, ones left.  Prices will inevitably rise and supplies will sooner or later be unreliable.  If we wait for something called the "unregulated free market" to respond, we will be sadly disappointed, especially if we live in the Tahoe area, which is somewhat isolated from and at a higher elevation than the closest urban areas, primarily Reno and Carson City.

So... that's the bad news: Our current patterns of life are heavily dependent on fossil fuels.  There's no miracle technology on the horizon that can provide anywhere close to the levels of energy we currently consume at anything close to a price we could afford.  Yes, there's wind and solar systems and we need to start building these where we can... more in a later post.  But we need to realize that these sources cannot, at least for many decades if ever, both replace most of the energy Americans are used to consuming at prices we're used to paying and provide enough energy to pay for their own replacement manufacturing and lifelong maintenance.  Right now, at very best, wind and solar can provide an assist to the fossil fuel systems we all depend upon.  We have a long, long way to go in order to develop sustainable lifestyles.

Future posts will discuss energy, food, shelter, water and waste water processing, medical care, transportation, education, and ideas for a new sustainable economic base that could help make the Tahoe region more robust and sustainable than it is today.