Cameron Leckie is on the right track about the profound impact on our lives of future constraints on fossil fuels. But he is brave in making such detailed forecasts about employment. I would tell my newly graduating daughter to ignore his career advice.

In similar vein, some five years ago I wrote the following for a chemistry journal. Nothing since then has changed my mind:

"Primarily we need to accept that we have been exploiting a rich bonanza of fossil fuels that simply cannot be replaced. Representing a concentrated, chemically rich store of solar energy accumulated over hundreds of millions of years, it is the basis of our present material wealth.

In the long term, geosequestration of carbon dioxide might make viable the continued use of plentiful fossil fuels, like coal and tar sands, in favourable locations. There will be an increasing contribution from nuclear power. Nuclear electricity will favour the use of electrified transport as conversion to hydrogen is much less efficient. Biofuels will be used for transport, but competing land uses will soon set a limit. Other renewable energies like solar and wind will have only a small impact; their dilute and intermittent nature is immutable and, despite recurring public calls for more investment, no amount of research can overcome those impediments.

The greenhouse response will inevitably make energy more precious. In the developed countries we will gradually adapt. Our expectations of things like car performance, house size and comfort, leisure travel abroad, year-round availability of seasonal foods, and all the other trappings of modern living that depend on energy will progressively move downwards. The production of goods and services will decline, which will be a huge political problem. In the mean time, the developing nations, aspiring quite reasonably to our living standards, will continue to increase their use of the available fossil fuels. Globally, populations, living standards and energy consumption will grow. There will be no slowdown in total greenhouse gas emissions and no magic technology fix allowing life to continue as normal. We will have to find ways to put up with the consequences.

So Cameron, we'll all have to start raising chickens and veggies in our back gardens.

Bbbbwwwwwhahahahahahah!

These doom and gloom laden forcasts are a staple of civilised life. The end is nigh! Repent of ye sins of consumption!

To work through just one of the issues in the article, let us take peak oil. Cameron, you realise that this has all been overturned in the past year or so? Google "fracking" and follow the links. Vast deposits of shale oil and gas, particularly gas, have been unlocked by recent changes in technology. There may well be some short term distruption due to the switch from easy lift oil to unconventional sources, but that's all the original peak oil forecasts were about anyway.

No one in their right mind who knew anything about the oil industry has forecast the end of oil as such, at least not since the 1970s.

As for the end of economic life as we know it, there were a lot of hopeful pronouncements during the financial crisis that capitalism was finally going to die. Nope! Its still there. No sign of it going away. Try again in 2020s..

curmudgeon .. isn't someone making a fuel from CO2, I know there was one years ago using sunlight and CO2, but I thought recently there had been another breakthrough.

That would be anathema to the green/eco types, who want all of the users energy to be punished. It's like Nuclear Power, the biggest problem to the green/eco types, is that it is a solution.

We'll always find another fuel .. even if we have to grow it, and no that's not perfect, but it is available.

Civilization is not going to stop when the fossil fuels run out, that's a fantasy of the green/eco activists, they want so much for that to happen. So we can all go back to simpler lives, yeah right.

Amicus - I haven't heard of the fuel out of CO2 idea - although it would be poetic justice as you say - but I've very recently been told of companies that have been formed to make oil out of coal, and out of plastics.

Making oil out of coal is an old concept (the Germans did it in WWII), and plastics are (I think) made from petroleum feedstocks - but with prices where they are anything is possible. I'll keep an eye out.

It has been proposed that Martian astronauts make rocket fuel for their return journey using exhaled CO2 and hydrogen from distilled urine split by solar energy; refer 'Sabatier process'. Whether things get that bad here on Earth the fact remains that energy must get more expensive. Liquid fuels because they are running out, wind and solar because they are intermittent and nuclear because the safety standards have to be raised so much higher.

It does seem likely that the world of the future will have less scope for stockbrokers and real estate agents and more scope for small scale farmers. There will be more surplus labour, less tractor diesel and less artificial fertiliser while food processing and distribution will have to be kept simple. Oh yes and more floods and heatwaves. I'd say the good times peaked around 1985. If you think this can't be so just wait til China cuts back on commodity imports and qualified people can't get the jobs they used to. Every year will inch in this direction so we don't have to wait long.

There you go, Taswegion knew of the CO2 out of fuel proposal.

I regret that I agree with him about nothing else except, possibly, China. Yes, when the China boom does finally break that is going to cause problems, and those problems may last perhaps three to four years.

As for the rest, workforce numbers in both agriculture and manufacturing, both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the employment total, have been heading down for many years. A catalysm would be required for any number to shift back - but what cataclysm, where? We have just been through the biggest financial emergency since the depression and, in the end, all it really did in Australia was stir up a few doomsayers.