Let me paint an energy scenario for you. You live in a large high rise or modest village/suburb. The body corp/local council treats all biological waste onsite. Given we will almost always create biological waste the resultant energy will be both carbon neutral and endlessly sustainable.
All biological waste is fed through a 2 tank system, set at the lowest point to eliminate as much as possible energy sapping pumping stations. The first tank, roughly the size of a shipping container thoroughly sterilises the "product" and the second generates copious quantities of methane on site. The methane is stored in a simple bladder and is fed into a ceramic fuel cell on demand. Enough energy is created to completely power the high rise or village. A by product of the process is endlessly available free hot water. The addition of food scraps and wastage creates a saleable energy surplus. The treated waste can then flow on to a nearby algae farm, where the nutrient load and the waste water combine to create 100,000's of tons of algae, annually. Algae consume twice their bodyweight in Co2 emission and under optimised conditions, double that bodyweight every 24 hours. Some algae are up to 60% oil, which is child's play to extract as a ready to use endlessly available ultra cheap bio-diesel.
We don't need population growth to support endlessly sustainable abundant lifestyles and a big enough economic pie to ensure everyone has enough of everything they need. All we need ever do is eliminate poverty in all its forms wherever we find it. This along with complete recycling, and the end of designed obsolescence, will allow a natural and sustainable economic growth pattern to progress and prosper us all.
We are surrounded by water and recent design advances make desalination, more economically viable than myriad dams designed to store and evaporate copious quantities of rainfall. Similarly, wind-powered dehumidifiers, can supply most households total needs. Sensible recycling, will address climate change; but only if we humans avail ourselves of the foregoing or similar solutions, during this very decade. Rhrosty

Dear Ludwig, that's because your posts ends up in self referentialism which posits that technology is bad, people are bad, the earth is doomed. But at least you're honest.

The 'big lie' here is that the article is a front for depopulating the earth. It's barking mad and so are you if you support this kind of thinking - which I don't believe you do.

This article is a trifecta of loony demand side thinking that blames the human body for consuming oil while attacking capitalism for destroying the earth and causing climate change.

When an author resorts to paranoid fruitloops like shadowstats to “prove” that governments are “lying” to us about economic growth, you can tell they are getting desperate. Apart from confusing shadowstats’ arguments about manipulation of the CPI and GDP growth, does anyone really think we’d have a better measure of inflation or economic activity if assume we still have the spending patterns of 1980 (when no-one had a desktop or laptop computer, internet service or mobile phone, for example)?

Let me add to my previous post by saying we are not discussing pie in the sky solutions. The onsite creation of power through digesters, is already in operation on Norfolk Island, Great Britain, and Denmark. A modest firm in Melbourne is manufacturing ceramic fuel cells, which work just as well on methane as hydrogen. An firm in Perth manufactures wind powered dehumidifiers. Gatton university has bred a diesel tree, which reportedly can supply up to 5 tons of diesel per annum per tree. Bio-diesel refiners are currently made on the Gold Coast and are available from around$15,000 per basic unit. Wave power has already been trialled here and the lower level compression chamber and the automatically reversing fan blades have proven that this endlessly sustainable energy solution is going to be cheaper than coal-fired power, as will tidal hydro solutions that utilise our northern tides, which occur twice every 24 hours and regularly exceed 40 foot/10 metres. A locally developed battery system incorporates capacitors, which enables recharging in just minutes, while you take a comfort break or quick cup of coffee.
We have a veritable plethora of locally available solutions/innovation, some of which like commercial algae production, will save our coal-fired power stations/coal exports/steel production; and the very cheap energy that gave us our most viable manufacturing industries; and international competitive edge.
All that appears to be missing is the pro Australia leaders, who understand this and indeed, the fact that we do not need to sell our souls to the devil or international cartels, with their great big bags of debt funded capital; to decarb the economy, when we can more readily access the very same sources of capital more cheaply; through the long overdue introduction of thirty year bonds and comprehensive tax reform and vast simplification, which I've exhaustively outlined elsewhere. Rhrosty.

Humanity’s faith in what I call the Pollyanna Principle - everything will work out right in the end - is eternal. After all, it is what gets us through the day.

Unfortunately, the same principle applied in the early 1930s allowed Hitler to set the world on fire. A quick glance through any textbook on world history would show that the Pollyanna Principle does not apply to the many civilizations that lie buried beneath the mud.
Writers on these issues are so fastidious about statistics and probabilities, admirably, because of such is the nature of science, yet they usually fail to pay attention to detail when writing the last chapter of a book, the unit on "what must be done."

In the first place, how likely is it that such massive change in human behaviour will ever take place? It would be necessary for a large percentage of the human race to become literate, to read books, and to understand difficult scientific abstractions, scholarly entanglements which are neither comic nor tragic but simply unpropitious. Yet that is precisely the opposite of how most people behave.

Secondly, the entire political structure of every country would have to be changed almost instantly. The system would have to be utterly transformed so that political representatives were chosen, not from among those who have learned the art of buying votes, but from a group of philosopher-kings like those of Plato’s Republic and I’m not sure I would want to trust even those people.

Thirdly, the head of each country would have to go on television, disrupt the leading prime-time program, and announce that the driving of automobiles was henceforth largely banned. It would have to be explained that tax incentives would be provided to people who have few or no children. All of that is certainly unlikely, one of the worst at devouring and polluting, and that consistently boycotts all serious international efforts at solving global problems.

Since all of that is highly improbable, it might make more sense to say, "A catastrophe is inevitable. What do we do next?"

Daffy Duck/Taswegian

Taswegion - I'm well aware that petrol prices are high, the question is why are they high? The peak oil scenario that the world is running out of oil died some time back. The article's author is one of the few die hards left in the area. The actual reason has to do with OPEC not investing in production facilities, while unconventional oil expands to make up the shortfall. If the world economy had not be subdued of late, incidentally, prices would be higher.

Daffy Duck - I think you're talking about lack of potable water in lessor developed countries etc which has been the case for many years. But if you want to talk about drought in Aus, you're too late by a couple of years..