Amicus said "at the end of the 19th century, it was similar to the way it is now, much doomsaying, electricity was bad and dangerous, the motor vehicle was evil etc etc but fortunately the doom sayers were not as well organized as they are today"

All very true Amicus, but the assent of cheap and abundant energy was still ahead of them. We no longer have that luxury.

And not for one moment am I saying that there will be "no" future, just one that every different to what we know today. The earth is being pillaged for increasingly rare resources. Massive human population growth has only been made possible by the extraction and use of fossil fuels. Without oil, for example, the "green revolution" would never have happened and many more people would be living in continuing famine or not be here at all. Modern medicine could never have come about without the same cheap and abundant fossil oil source and once again, that medicine has lead to greatly increased lives for people in the Western culture.

I know Amicus, that nothing I say will ever change your view, but I'm big enough to say that I really do hope you're right because I already have 6 grand children and I want them to have the same opportunities that I had growing up. You asked Sarnian for a time frame. Well, I'll give you one. We will experience serious fuel shortages before 2020, probably 2015 but lets just say 2020, just 9 years away! Following that, we will see world finances spiral out of control into a depression of ever intensifying magnitude. There will be no available "cheap" energy to build the future you talk about, but I'll make this deal with you..........

If we're still pounding away at the keyboard and nothing has changed by 2020, I'll willingly travel to meet you, provided it's possible and shout you a nice lunch somewhere. Hell, I'll even throw in a beer (also a wine or spirit) and I'll stand up before you and apologise for my pessimism. Unfortunately, should my predictions come to pass, then I won't be getting a free lunch from you, so it's a very one sided equation :-)

Amicus is the eternal optimist, however one should never forget the old exponential function, especially when one considers population (the good old elephant in the room). We are hitting the limits to growth, the evidence is everywhere. People like Amicus just like to keep the blinkers on. The author, although on the right track but his final paragraph beggars belief, he should learn about the Jevon's Paradox......Jevons paradox (also known as the rebound effect) is the observation that greater energy efficiency, while in the short-run producing energy savings, may in the long-run result in higher energy use. It was first noted by the British economist W. Stanley Jevons, in his book The Coal Question published in 1865.

Amicus can see a bright future, apparently because he works in the high tech end of town and his view of the future seems ever bright, rightly or wrongly. Ultimately technology folds with substitution and efficiency and we end up back with the Jevons issue.....good luck with that

I've been hammering on for ages on OLO about the direct link between economic growth and oil. Just as you can count calories in terms of oil, you can economic growth as well. This is why I'm against a carbon tax, because it's a piss-weak response to the problem: maintain the rate of consumption (and this isn't for quality of life, it's for the capital that gets scooped off the top). The real hard problem that no one will contemplate, because there's putatively "no alternative to capitalism", is that the problems of peak oil, AGW and the rest "cannot" be addressed in an economic growth context.
I wish someone would point out the flaw in my reasoning!
How can we reduce consumption of oil and greenhouse gases in an economic growth paradigm--which means more people, infrastructure and the markets they drive?

amicus, let it go mate .. leave them to their happy state of pessimism.

For the optimists two items from What's New
NORMAN BORLAUG: THE DEATH OF THE GREATEST AMONG US.
He died Saturday at the age of 95. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Gregg Easterbrook described him as "the very personification of human goodness." He was that, but he was also a brilliant scientist and tireless teacher of poor farmers in distant lands. His own education began in a one- room schoolhouse in Iowa. His work in agronomy led to the Green Revolution and saved perhaps 1 billion lives. In accepting the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize, however, Borlaug warned against complacency: "we are dealing with two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction. . . Man also has acquired the means to reduce the rate of human reproduction, effectively and humanely . . . but has not yet used this potential adequately. There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until food production and population control unite in a common effort."

3. POPULATION: THE BOMB IS STILL TICKING.
Libertarians are fond of pointing out that John Holdren, the President's science adviser, collaborated with Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb). Shocking! Ehrlich’s best-selling 1968 book predicted mass starvation by the end of the 20th century due to unconstrained population growth. Ironically, the major health problem in the US today is an obesity epidemic. But not everyone lives in the US. Two technological developments postponed the looming catastrophe: the green revolution for which Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and the Pill. In most industrialized countries the Pill has brought the fertility rate down to about 2.1, needed for a stable population. In Muslim nations however, which suppresses women’s rights, fertility is as high as 8.
And, like it or not we are exhausting fossil carbon at an alarming rate and without where will we get essentials such as fertilizers and other chemical feedstock and reducing agents?