Great stuff Cameron! Pity there will be so many bleaters and knockers after this comment that will try to maintain their own illusion of normality and a business-as-usual future by decrying you as a doomer. We may one day see these ideas in a budget speech but it will be in a time when there are few resources to budget and too many people begging for help - but don't believe that the bleaters and knockers will ever admit that they were wrong even then.

"Declining marginal returns".

Humanity will continue to be constrained by the availability of those resources essential to human existence - food, water, air, shelter, energy. The shape of human civilisation will be determined accordingly. Change and adaptation will continue, even as resources become scarce or unavailable. If not, nations will become failed states, global warfare will be the norm, and the last man standing will hoard resources until they too are exhausted, and man will once again take up simple farming to survive. This wouldn't be the preferred end vision, but it may be inevitable, unless biological or geophysical mechanisms are developed to take the place of oil, gas and coal.

"Catabolic Collapse" - another way of saying "adapt, change, or die".

Agriculture is suffering with cost and availability of inputs, but its major threat is from over-specialisation - of crops, livestock and production systems.

Health Care is suffering population growth and increasing human longevity, evolution of super-bugs, and our desire to cure or treat every possible human frailty.

Energy availability is only limited by our Unwillingness to adopt alternatives to conventional systems.

Climate change is inevitable, and human and environmental outcomes will be dependent on visionary adaptation.

Instead of "... sound money must be the basis of a sustainable economy", perhaps the author should have proposed: "A sustainable economy, in terms of social, fiscal and environmental outcomes, should be the only determinant of wealth. (Manipulating monetary and banking systems is Really fiddling with periphery.) Private wealth and debt in a sustainable system will be constrained by those very factors which act to ensure that sustainability, be it legislation, law or social pressures.

Why is aviation fuel so cheap? This might be acceptable for essential transport, but appears ludicrous for touring.

Short of xenophobia, we in Oz need to adapt to internally sustainable systems, or we risk disintegration, and it will take visionary action to avoid many of us having to become Amish.

Surely the objective is to avoid failure, by staged systems overhaul, rather than awaiting enforced reconstruction?

Agree with your last post, Saltpetre.

A structured transition to sustainable, clean(er) technology will also create more jobs even though some jobs will be lost in mining fuels. Rather a careful transition than waiting till seas have become so acid most marine life is wiped out and the last tree felled.

Whether a person believes climate change is influenced by humans or not is no longer (if it ever was) an excuse for 'business-as-usual'. We humans like to boast about our adaptability - would rather we adapt in a rational manner than in a bun fight when resources are depleted and our environment poisoned. We know what happens to other creatures which were unable to change in times of climate change past - they provided as with a fossil record from which we can learn, but walk the earth no more.

I am not entirely happy with just a carbon tax unless it is reinvested into sustainable technology, however I prefer it to Abbott's bleating of "no more big tax" and offering no solution to our long term viability.

Cameron's article points up a matter which I have believed for some time.
Global warming is not the problem that should be the first focus of our concern.
If we had acted on energy much sooner then we would not have that AGW concern.

The Hirsch report pointed out that to get a smooth energy transition to
a new energy system would take 20 year from before peak oil.
As we did not start that transition it is now too late for the smooth
transition.

There is an enormous number of individual projects that need to be
undertaken to avoid a collapse in our economy.
Just one example will point up the range of adaptions that will be needed.

A crash program in the breeding of draught horses.
With diesel fuel being either too expensive or not available farmers
will need other means to plough harvest and transport.
An alternative could be steam tractors hauling by wire cultivation
machinery across the paddock. This an old and proven technology.
It was used to feed the workers in the industrial revolution.

Such farming methods will be less productive than our current system
and will result in a many times larger farming workforce.
When I have made such suggestions in conversation the reaction varies
between ridicule or a thoughtful silence.

Depending on electricity supply it may be feasible to electrify farm machinery.

Everything depends on how a complex society contracts. Some believe
that complex societies can only collapse catastrophically.
They show as an example what has happened to the Japanese motor industry
since the earthquake.

The above is just one problem that an oil declining society will face.

"Energy availability is only limited by our Unwillingness to adopt alternatives to conventional systems."

Not so.

Alternative energy sources are also limited by their much lower EROEI than oil based fuels.

EROEI = Energy Returned On Energy Invested.

It is exactly the same principal as you wage and resulting bank balance.

With oil based fuels we are currently on a very high energy wage and have abundant surplus energy income, once our base living costs are paid, to do other things with.

Hence our economies and societies are currently rich and diverse.

That will change dramatically once oil based fuels become scarce and exhorbitantly expensive.

Then we will be on a much lower energy wage and will have very little surplus energy income left over.

As a result our economies will become drastically reduced and simplified and will be capable of sustaining far fewer people.

Take solar and wind derived energy. All forms of solar and wind energy require unprecedented infastructure to harvest an equivlaent amount of energy contained in vastly smaller amount of oil.

I don't see how we can manufacture, implement and maintain such MASSIVE amounts of infrastructure once cheap oil is consigned to the history books.

How would you construct massive wind turbines, on any significant scale, without cheap diesel powered trucks to transport the materials and cheap diesel powered cranes to lift the massive components hundreds of metres into the air?

So true Mr Windy,
The secret of the poor performance of wind turbines
is revealed in the basic arithmetic of windmills.
The output is proportional to the cube of the windspeed.

That being so with the maximum design windspeed maximum electrical
output is achieved. However as the wind reduces the output falls in
proportion to the cube root of the windspeed change.

Because the wind blows at maximum speed for only short periods in any
time period you select the total KWHrs is always very much lower than
the maximum nameplate rating. 15% seems to be a typical output.
However all the supporting infrastructure has to be built to the
rating of maximum output, yet only 15% of maximum output is available.
This means rapid changes in output which makes network control difficult.

This is what makes windfarm electricity very expensive.