Yabby, your comment is excellent. If we returned to that era we wouldn't have war either. Oil and war go together. Oil and exploitation go together. Oil and Oligarchs go together.

No oil = a more sensible, less destructive, more peaceful world!

If someone who hasn't contributed a post on this article is referred to as a nut case, I'll be interested to see what the reaction is to this post. Peak Oil: it's a myth in spite of people like Mark foretelling the imminent destruction of the world as we know it for at least the past 6 or 8 years. It's a myth because, as the price of oil rises due to shortage or increased demand, so alternative sources of energy will become available thanks to the laws of economics making it viable to develop or exploit the alternatives. It's an old saying but the stone age didn't end because the world ran out of stones: it ended because new and better ways of doing things were discovered or invented. So it will be with oil and the world will not suffer more than a temporary blip in the on-going and relentless march towards a higher standard of living and a better quality of life for its human inhabitants.

One of the replacement fuel options of the future will be endlessly available hydrogen. Extracted from endlessly available sea water, via vastly improved Memtech filtration/catalytic water molecule cracking, and then used to power super silent fuel cells, it becomes water again; indeed, the purest most pristine available?
Sodium ion batteries will likely replace rarer more costly lithium. Combination capacitor ion batteries, will reduce recharging times, to just 5 minutes or less.
And the introduction of the lighter than lithium sodium ion? Could extended ranges to around 400 kilometres? Given a rest break comfort stop is required for every three hours of travel? Electric vehicles may well predominate road transport options, with very cheaply produced hydrogen being preferred as an onsite, Industrial fuel cell power generation source for rail, and large industrial processes or manufacture.
Almost totally irrefutable basic common sense, should require us to build many more dams, most of which could also produce hydro electric power/hydrogen, which would maintain reasonably stable environmental flows; between increasingly severe weather events; all while mitigating against environmentally disastrous and ever worsening flood events? i.e., Massive erosion and marine environment, flora and fauna damage; or, even possible extinction?
Well look, if the sea grass and or coral is repeatedly killed off, [by suspended flood water solids,] so also the species totally dependant on it/them. Rhrosty.

If you read pages 182 and 183 from Paul Robert's book "End of Oil" published in 2004 you will see how John Howard sold off our gas at bargain basement prices to the Chinese. It is an unrecognised, tragic national scandal (Just google the book name etc. and read it online at Google Books for free.)

Congratulations Bernie Masters - you have just presented the energy economics argument against peak oil which has already been pretty well thoroughly debunked, not least by the recent commentary in Nature on 26 January. The failure of oil production to respond to the price signals since 2005 shows that the system has reached a limit and that economic theory is wrong. Its obvious - the world really IS finite.

Michael_in-Adelaide, if you read my post again, you'll see that I said: "alternative sources of energy will become available thanks to the laws of economics making it viable to develop or exploit the alternatives". Of course the world will run out of oil one day but that's not the issue. The only important issue is whether there will be alternative sources of energy to keep the world's economy turning and economics says that of course there will be.