I argue that all of our current environmental problems stem from one source: infrastructural inertia. Infrastructural inertia not only includes technical and scientific infrastructure but it also includes political, economic and social inertia as well. What are some examples of what I'm talking about?

• In the United States, people still use the British Imperial measuring system in casual speech. Road signs and speedometers are still calibrated in the old system.
• Despite many better alternatives, calander reform is still stuck. No one seems willing to bite the bullet and change all the computers and paper calanders. Dvorak keyboards are another example.
  

Those don't have anything to do with environmental matters directly but they are examples of the kind of socio-technical inertia I'm talking about.

Changing infrastructure in the digital world is easier. Y2K was about as bad as it gets. The adoption of Unicode and IPv6 are other examples.

But when people have to change business models, reform governmental policy or replace highways and power plants, things slow down to a crawl. Contrarians and apologists spring out from the woodwork to make specious arguments about why we should stay the course. But even if the contrarians (Devil's advocates do serve a good purpose. They sanity check us.) didn't exist it would still be very hard to get us all to mostly agree on a course of action.

And then there is the expense of replacing systems, system that work well enough and that are still being actively used, with newer and better systems. There are probably dozens of ways a major city could hugely improve it's sewage system but all them cost a lot of money and there will always be cost overruns from unexpected surprises. Complex and extensive change never seems to come cheap in the world of atoms.

I posted here in the forum before about this subject but it never really got a good response. I think this is an important subject to discuss because it's precisely this inertia that acts as the chief break on the rapture of the nerds Kurzweil loves to talk about it.

There is a book that came out recently by Bob Seidensticker called Future Hype that mentions this infrastructural inertia. I recently went to a lecture by him and I think he made several key points.

Once I get a copy, I think we should discuss it. I'm also planning an short essay of sorts to be cross-posted from my blog to the BH blog stream. But before all that, I'd like to hear what you have to say about this problem and why you think it is or isn't a problem.