Don't worry Sam there is plenty of Methane lying on the bottom of the oceans, just waiting for us to start vacuuming it up. Of course we'll have to exhaust the oil, & gas before it's worth the trouble.

Once we get poor enough, you'll find even the greenies will demand we go harvest the very large oil reserves under the great barrier reef. As with their resistance to dams, until we looked like running out of water, green is not such a nice colour, when you're thirsty, cold or hungry.

I do agree we may have to get close to third world conditions for some, the worst of the green element is well insulated in academia & the bureaucracy, & will take some convincing It may happen, as most of them are in the inner cities, you expect to collapse.

May not happen though, at the rate China is buying up the farm, [& the mines} we may find them coming in to take possession of their possessions. It wouldn't take them long to get all our drones out of the ivory towers, & into the fields.

Good information Bazz.
There was more than not putting the back up power on ground level.
No one will guarantee a nuclear reactor, safe against all odds. If it were we would not have leaks, or meltdowns.
Japan is going to be in trouble for decades, and that is beside the reactor still causing problems.
The core has been damaged, and to what extent no-one knows.
So how do you defuse a working reactor, and render it safe.

Sam;
Well the optimists fall between your two scenarios.
However there is a fourth group mainly populated with economists who
think we can keep growth going forever. Senor Monti the Italian PM
is one of those economists. He gave a speech recently when he mentioned
growth about twenty times but never o0nce mentioned energy.

All the talk in and about Europe waffles on about growth and how to use
pixel money to produce growth. It will be interesting to watch what happens.

With politicians like these we are in for an interesting time.

The first great problem we all face - including curmudgeon and anyone else with their blinkers on - is that oil and gas production everywhere is approaching the inflexion point where 'elastic' becomes 'inelastic'. This is fact, irrespective of what you imagine to be the cornucopia of ‘untapped’ reserves. There is far more to this than the price mechanism. All that increased 'value' does is drive us towards this inflexion point - it allows us to invest so that we move closer to it. Once we get there we encounter limits associated with technology, engineering, geology, ‘bottom line’ costs (environment etc etc etc). These mechanisms are all known and understood but there is little data easily available from mainstream reporting sources because we have not, to date, had to confront them. If we are all to engage in intelligent discussion and indeed, intelligent planning, then this stuff needs to be available.

The second great and closely related problem is that the challenge of resource depletion is not just about current or future per capita consumption which most debate appears to focus on. The far greater challenge lies in just ensuring continued maintenance of the myriad of structural and institutional entities that go to make up industrial society (any society for that matter). That's maintenance of everything from roads, bridges, water supplies and factories through to public services, educational institutions, health and governance systems and agriculture. Currently nearly all of our energy and resource production goes towards such maintenance. How do we expect to do something transformative and entirely new (nuclear power generation, Zero Carbon Australia etc) if our capacity to simply maintain some stable base is compromised?

I can’t see much positive happening in Oz until we collectively have a better data set and a better grasp of such issues.

Hear hear Savvas. Well said. Given that we have to replace infrastructure, on average, every 50 years, we need to spend 2 per cent (one fiftieth) of GDP just on that. But if our population grows by two per cent a year (which it was a couple of years ago but has dropped back to 1.4%) then we need to double the amount of money spent on infrastructure because we have to create new as well as replace old infrastructure. So in these uncertain times when we're about to experience the credit bubble bursting and money is likely to be in short supply in the near future, adding extra people to the population (native-born or immigrants - both have the same effect) is, well, madness. We're experiencing the end of economic growth and, hopefully, population growth as well.

To all the linkered and optimistic: Gasoline will hit $5 per gallon this year, predicts John Hofmeister, former president of Shell Oil Company, the U.S. subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell. He points to rising demand by developing countries, especially China and India, and says that the recent increase in U.S. oil supply rates and decrease in demand is not enough to offset global trends, and that prices will continue to creep upward, unless there are major changes in public policy to substantially increase domestic U.S. supply.

Gasoline prices could suddenly spike even higher, and though increases in U.S. domestic supply may be important, no realistic U.S. increase will offset declining yields from other nations, according to Professor Tadeusz Patzek, chair of the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, and vice-president of ASPO-USA's board of directors. He highlights that declining output from most oil-exporting nations over the past decade, in the face of rising global demand, is likely to create a lasting drop-off in global availability of oil—spelling serious consequences for all oil-importing nations, including Australia. Building an economy that runs on half as much oil is essential and unavoidable, according to Dr. Patzek.

Regardless of who is right, this issue needs to be examined with seriousness and urgency, not that you would know it from most of the blinkered comments above.