What is the appropriate response to Global Warming and Peak Oil catastrophies?

An interesting movement that is not only taking Global Warming and Peak Oil very seriously, but actually organizing people, communities and cities to take action to insulate themselves from the economic impact of what they forsee as the likely coming collapse of our current energy and economic systems, is the Transition Initiative. They are professing to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and to discovering and implementing ways to address this big question.

from their website
http://www.transitiontowns.org/
"for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain
itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate
the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to
mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?"
The resulting coordinated range of projects across all these areas of life leads to a collectively designed energy descent pathway.
The community also recognises two crucial points:
 that we used immense amounts of creativity, ingenuity and adaptability on the way up the energy upslope, and that there's no reason for us not to do the same on the downslope
 if we collectively plan and act early enough there's every likelihood that we can create a way of living that's significantly more connected, more vibrant and more in touch with our environment than the oil-addicted treadmill that we find ourselves on today.

The mission of this group is to create "communities across the UK to unleash their own collective genius and embark on an imaginative and practical range of connected initiatives, leading to a way of life that is more resilient, more fulfilling and more equitable, and that has dramatically lower levels of carbon emissions. " and it appears that they have actually gotten some traction. Regardless of their long term viability or success, I think they have some interesting things to say, and their website is worth checking out. Can you imagine a movement like this going anywhere in the USA?

The Transition Initiative groups focus on the issues of Peak Oil and Global Warming makes for an effective appeal, as there is a wide consensus among the scientific community, governmental and NGO's, that Global Warming is a serious threat, and the media penetration around this issue is influencing the greater general public opinion toward supporting measures mitigating underlying factors contributing to Global Warming. It is interesting that the methods they prescribe are so far outside the dialogue of US society that they sound almost revolutionary, but upon closer examination, bear a greater resemblance to a return to turn of the century economic and civic practices, rather than advancing some hidden subversive socialist agenda. The idea's put forward by this group, if adopted on a wide scale, would threaten the growth and consumption based economy that we live in today. Their message is more palatable because it is put forward as a response to their predictions of coming collapse of the current energy system, and offered as a survival or disaster mitigation strategy. I find their ideas attractive from many perspectives, including close cooperation among members of the community in implementing renewable non-carbon energy sources, and local production of food stuffs and materials for everyday life. Is it a Utopian dream to think that communities can strike some kind of balance between a globalized, corporatist economy on one hand, and a local community focus on certain basic needs of everyday life like energy and food production? It will be interesting to follow the success of these UK based community experiments and see at what level they are successful and if they spread to other parts of the world.