Is semen a viable alternative to fossil fuels?

Can the infrastructure for alternative energy sources be successfully built from bottom level before we run out of the fossil fuels?

• John Michael Greer claims that unless we can successfully rebuild post-industrial infrastructure, we will enter a "deindustrial age" via a long descent from where we currently are. He also argues that the time in which we have to do this before fossil fuels run out (gradually, over the next four decades) is so limited that alternative energy sources like renewables, fusion etc will not be able to pick up the slack from declining fossil fuels. We need around 150 years, just as industrialisation took a similar length of time to take us from agrarianism to where we are now, but we don't have 40 or even 5, he explains, to shift from dependence of fossil fuels to infrastructure based on renewables. Is this erroneous thinking or does he have a point? I guess, due to the above's being a proponent of peak oil theory and its implications, this is linked up with the question with whether or not the idea of peak oil holds any legitimacy, as well as whether it holds as much if not more now as it did in the late '70s/early '80s.

• Answer:

  A few years ago I might have agreed with him, but "fracking" has shifted the issue somewhat. An entertainingly written question on the subject: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3079/what-s-the-latest-on-peak-oil We have, in a sense, found a whole new supply of fossil fuel, and it's considerable, and growing.  (It's used primarily in the US right now, and we haven't really started exploring the rest of the world.) It's not a complete substitute for petroleum, but it shifts the balance substantially. It could provide additional fossil fuels for the next hundred years. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. In fact, it's rather disconcerting. I had hoped that a diminishing supply of fossil fuel would force us to consider alternatives to dumping carbon into the atmosphere and the oceans. Instead of economics working for us, it's going to instead be working against us. The need to shift to renewables is still urgent, and this makes it appear less urgent. It gives us the ability to cook ourselves. Technologically, I think it's pessimistic to think that it would take 150 years to switch to a different set of fuels. Technology accelerates over time, and a magnitude change that took 150 years the last time might take 30 or even 10 this time. I can think of myriad ways in which computer technology can help make the shift a lot faster. Self-driving cars can also refuel themselves. They might also diminish our attachment to our individual automobiles, making public transport (both long and short distance) more feasible. For the moment, electric vehicles are limited by power storage, but they're already making inroads because they reuse existing infrastructure. Fusion power, were it to exist, could conceivably change everything: we could even manufacture hydrocarbons out of the carbon dioxide in the air and go on living exactly the way that we are. Climate change and overpopulation are more significant disrupters of the future (along with the diminished productivity of the oceans, loss of fresh water and soil, and numerous other supposedly "infinite" resources that we're starting to get short on). We need to shift to alternate energy sources for that reason, but I don't think we're limited by either technology or the ability of the public to use it. We're limited by politics and an enormously powerful, pernicious notion that the problems are fake. They are very real, and unforeseeable advances like fracking cannot be counted on to save us from ourselves (and indeed may cause as many problems as they solve).