vanna,

I suggest we discover ways to wind back our reliance on petrol/diesel driven transport - which, of course, would necessitate a shift of paradigm.

We should loosen the global ties and encourage localities to move toward a more self-sufficient productivity. We, in the West, should stop our obscene waste.

I believe we should move away from denoting economic advancement as the sole criterion for human success.

I'm sure that all sounds suitably cliché.
The rpg's of this world have only two modes of judging progress - either we're ravaging the planet at an unsustainable level - or we're living in caves.

We either confront our predicament and act upon it or we experience collapse...that's the way it goes.

Smokehaze, Poriot

Well this is interesting:

"Powered only by natural sunlight, an array of nanotubes is able to convert a mixture of carbon dioxide and water vapour into natural gas at unprecedented rates."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16621-sunpowered-device-converts-cosub2sub-into-fuel.html

But supposing such technology is proven to be successful at producing fuels, there is still the question of how society becomes sustainable and satisfying enough so that people will want to live in that society.

Personally I don’t think life in Australia is sustainable, or is satisfying enough in the medium or longer term.

No society can last for very long if it is based on secularism, feminism, consumerism and importation, which is fast becoming the basis of our society.

Some interesting comments. It is quite funny how some people (curmudgeon) take relative statements and turn them into absolutes. Catabolic collapse does not imply industrial civilisation ends today and Mad Max takes over tomorrow. It is a long and slow decline, probably over a couple of centuries interspersed with periods of rapid decline (which I personally think we are witnessing the first decade or so of now) and other periods of relatively stability.

I don't consider myself a doomer curmudgeon, more a pragmatist - if something is unsustainable (such as our current method of organising our economy and society) that simply means that it cannot continue indefinitely. If this is the case this implies big changes coming our way. I would argue that it is better to acknowledge this than bury our heads in the sand and basing our response on 'hope.'

This leads to the comments on energy sources mentioned in the comments, many of which seem based on hope.
Take tar sands, at best they will only be producing 4 million barrels a day (or thereabouts - this is from memory) by 2030 according to the Canadian government. This is less than the production lost each year to oil field depletion. Clearly tar sands are not going to save our current way of life. The situation is similiar for Coal to Liquids, biofuels (including algal based biofuels), and unconventional gas (read behind the headlines I suggest). I am sure they will all play a part in our energy future - but we won't be consuming nearly 90 mb/d of oil in 20 or 30 years. Probably not even in 10 years.

>> This leads to the comments on energy sources mentioned in the comments, many of which seem based on hope. <<

leckos (and others) - did you actually read/understand the link?

http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911

Or did you really think it was an April Fool's joke? Curmudgeon, rpg, Amicus, et al?

The Bakken oil field is the largest US oil discovery since Alaska 's Prudhoe Bay, and has the potential to eliminate all American dependence on foreign oil.

The EIA estimates it at 503 billion barrels. Even if just 10% of the oil is recoverable, at current prices, that's a resource base worth more than $6 trillion.

New technology has opened up Bakken's massive reserves, giving access of up to 500 billion barrels.

It's a 'light, sweet oil'. If anyone here on this thread so far new anything about oil reserves/exploration (obviously not by them drumming up tar sands and shale oil for fracking sake) then they would know the Americans are on a winner ... in their own back yard no less.

It's enough crude to fuel the American economy for a very very long time.

What is conspiratorial (where the frack is Arjay?) - George dubya knew about this and still funded South American 'buddies' to cut down Amazon rain forests and plant corn crops instead - not to feed people, but to fracking supply the US transport fleet with ethanol!

smokehaze - yes, there are fools here ... on 365 days of the year :(

bonmot, the USGS press release states 3 to 4.3 billion barrels with daily production of 75,000 barrels a day. The reserves are only 10% of annual global production and daily production is less than 0.1% of global daily production. It is hardly a game changer.

Here is a link to a more realistic assessment of Bakken's potential:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3868

You have not provided a link to the EIAs claim of 503 billion barrels so I cannot comment on that.

leckos: Yeah, you're probably right. No wonder everybody is having knuckle dusters over a summer ice free Arctic within a few decades.

Hope? That is the domain of people with their heads stuck in the sands (pun intended).