No new cars with mpg below 50, full stop (hey, that should be good for high tech manufacturers - or are these only in France and Italy?)

Siemens, Infineon, Bosch and plenty of others... No shortage of technology companies in Germany.

Nah. It tells the story of the painless-in-the-short-term alternatives.

Do you seriously think we will see any real, painful, change before the proverbial shit hits the proverbial fan?

It took the 1973 oil crisis to get Sweden and France going, and for the rest of the world, even that crisis wasn't enough.

make people pay for all the externalities in electricity production (see the EU report I have pointed to many times, from ExternE - no link, I'm on dialup);

That's a great study, more people should read it.

mandate more wind - stop doing it on a one windturbine per one windturbine basis as they've done so far.

I'd rather see a total ban on new fossil-fired heating, industry and power systems, but the general idea is the same.

get serious about car energy consumption. No new cars with mpg below 50, full stop (hey, that should be good for high tech manufacturers - or are these only in France and Italy?)

How do we get people to buy them? The 78 mpg AudiA2 wasn't really a smash hit...

And some people actually do need heavy vehicles. So I'd much rather see another policy, a doubling of the tax on gasoline and diesel fuel.

get serious about priorities re train infrastructure vs roads.

In Sweden that would be "get serious about building (and maintaining!) infrastrucuture". We don't only need new and better rail, but also new and better roads, but most importantly the current systems need more maintenance. A single investment in maintenace of €10 billion should take care of that. (Like that's fortcoming...)

get serious about housing insulation. No new building without top notch standards, and a crash programme to refurbish older stock (hey, that should be good for business)

Not that important around here where no one heats with fossil fuel and the grid is fossil-free. Furthermore, there have been a couple of scandals lately in Sweden, where energy efficient housing practices that were deployed on a vast scale seems to cause rot, also that on a vast scale. Ooops.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

Nah. It tells the story of the painless-in-the-short-term alternatives.

Jerome, I can't help but see some irony here.

Aren't you the same person who appropriately and tirelessly denounces the neocon ideology of endless "reforms" as published in the pages of the Financial Times, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal and other outlets, this endless droning of "necessary pain" that, in the imagination of those plutocratic pukes, the populace must suffer through for the "benefit of the society at large" (and the very actual benefit of their rich patrons)?

:>

If Jerome thinks it can all be done with wind, he'd better give some figures to show how.  

Here's a back-of-envelope calculation

germany's current electricity consumption is 1.6  billion kWh/day  To cut CO2 emissions, you need to shift most transport to electrified rail (as Jerome advocates) and to plug-in electric road vehicles.  At a minimum, this will double electricity consumption to 3 billion kWh/day.  

Onshore wind is the only renewable source likely to make much contribution to this.  Wind farms have an average output of about 50,000 kWh/day per sq km.  So you'd need 60000 sq km of wind farms - one seventh of germany's land area - for average wind output to equal average consumption.   For peak capacity, you'd need far more than this, even with pumped storage and demand management.  Does anyone really think that allocating this much land to wind farms is feasible?