Hi Philip,

If you are new to peak oil then, as a computer scientist, you will enjoy this (rather old) essay, "Peak Oil and the Preservation of Knowledge":

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/18978

By the way, as someone concerned about climate change you may be interested to know that there is not "plenty of coal":

http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/20593576/885722944/name/Patzek+and+Croft+2010+-+Peak+Coal+2011.pdf

or use this tiny URL:

http://tinyurl.com/2947fyn

michael_in_adelaide, thanks for the pointer to the peak coal article. I'm aware that there are rather divided views on this but it will not be terribly long before the accuracy of a prediction of peak coal in 2011 is tested. We should not also forget that there are vast amounts of methane in the oceans in the form of methane hydrates or clathrates that have not up to now been exploited because they are extremely unstable. Park a ship above one of these and try to tap into it, and you risk a huge bubble of methane in the water destroying your ship's buoyancy, for example. Then there's the problem that methane is any extremely potent greenhouse gas and some estimates of the amount in the oceans could push us well into a hothouse climate. So destabilising this stuff is seriously risky. Each step we take away from relatively easily extracted fossil fuels increases this sort of risk and of course the risk that we don't have the energy resources to build whatever comes next.

We don't have to agree on all the details to accept that serious work on a new energy economy is becoming urgent.

The Easter Island analogy is excellent. We're certainly in the business of chopping down the last trees, or using up the oil that we need to develop an alternative energy economy. At least the European Union's energy chief Guenther Oettinger acknowledged in November that oil had already peaked. It does give hope that the EU might take the lead in developing renewables and alternative energy sources. As for population, there is a very real risk of mass starvation as oil declines, combined with harvest reductions because of climate change, desertification, loss of biodiversity (e.g. bees to pollinate crops)and shortage of water (e.g. glaciers melting so rivers become seasonal). It is thus critical that, in dealing with all these manifold problems, we ensure universal reproductive health services so all people have the ability to limit their family size. It's easier to feed two children than five in times of food shortages.

Perhaps the most immediate problem facing Homo sapiens is degradation of human expectations.

In between the hiccups of war, depression, and intermittent tragedy on some very gross scales, people in general have been able to envisage prospects of improvement in their own lives, or for at least that of their children.

A great many have come to believe that normality lies in lifestyles of ever-increasing consumption and leisure-creation; and that anything less than that - perhaps more embedded in the reality of the environment upon which they depend, belongs to the hair-shirt brigade of a pre-technological age.

When a sense of deprivation, from their perceived entitlements, descends upon these people, discontent will breed like mould on last week’s bread. The spores of the fungus are already evident in the rantings of such people as: those denying the scientific data on climate change; the she’ll be right mob on cheap fossil fuel limits; and the “consumption, not numbers” campaigners against humanitarian action to minimize population pressure.

Life on this planet could be damned rough just around the corner, and escalating

Use of the "Easter Island story" to headline this article is on a par with the rest of it - scary, but insubstantial.

"One theory of what happened is that the islanders harvested all their trees, leaving them incapable of not only building more statues, but building ocean-going craft that would have allowed them to escape their fate, once their unsustainable consumption caused their food supply to collapse. Consequently population of the island plummeted, amid a decline into cannibalism."

Another theory goes:

"It appears there may have been two classes or races of inhabitants, those with long ears and those with short ears. The long eared people were the rulers. The short eared, who came earlier, were the workers. For this reason, most of the statues have long ears. Eventually, the short eared people revolted and killed all the long eared people."

http://www.qsl.net/w5www/easterisland.html

I rather like that one. Here's another:

"Other researchers have no doubt that its people, their culture and its environment were destroyed to all intents and purposes by European slave-traders, whalers and colonists - and not by themselves"

http://sacredsites.com/americas/chile/easter_island.html

Colonists and traders, huh? Here's more on that...

"In December 1862, Peruvian slave raiders struck Easter Island. Violent abductions continued for several months, eventually capturing or killing around 1500 men and women, about half of the island's population. International protests erupted, escalated by Bishop Florentin-Etienne Jaussen of Tahiti. The slaves were finally freed in autumn, 1863, but by then most of them had already died of tuberculosis, smallpox and dysentery. Finally, a dozen islanders managed to return from the horrors of Peru, but brought with them smallpox and started an epidemic, which decimated the island's population to the point where some of the dead were not even buried."

http://www.crystalinks.com/easterisland.html

But wait! Don't forget the rats...

"...anthropologist Terry Hunt blames the Polynesian rat for deforesting the 66-square-mile island's 16 million palm trees"

http://www.physorg.com/news8793.html

But why spoil a good yarn with conflicting theories, eh?

Hi. It's difficult to see how methane hydrates could be harvested at an energy profit - although it is true that their increased gasification due to warming of the seas could be a positive feedback driving global warming. Fortunatetly the half-life of methane in the atmosphere (before it is converted to e.g. water and CO2) is shorter than for CO2. Colin - "ever-increasing consumption and leisure-creation" is only half right. Who has more leisure nowadays? It is leisure-destruction that most of us are used to.

Just so that we are clear regarding "the she’ll be right mob on cheap fossil fuel limits", Hubbert curves are PRODUCTION RATE curves. Prices of production can go up but that does not mean that production rates will not fall (just as we are seeing right now for oil). Yes, you can mine carbon when the price goes higher but eventually it must stop due to lack of energy profit. Higher prices are just an expression in economic terms of the fact that more of the energy from energy production must be recycled back into energy production (i.e. energy profit is falling).