I have to wonder if any of this matters. We all live either inside or outside of a great bubble. Those who live inside believe in a future for their children and grandchildren that rivals anything from the most futuristic cartoons and movies. For them, the hope is that someone will learn to break the 2nd law of thermodynamics allowing them to do all kinds of marvellous things, many of which have been listed in the above posts.

There are also those who live outside the bubble. They believe that the use of the cheap and abundant energy contained in oil and it's derivatives have allowed humanity to breed in rampant numbers and those numbers and the use of precious resources is now threatening the very foundation on which society is built.

Does it matter which side of the bubble you're on? No amount of facts or argument will sway you. It's a bit like the argument between god believers and atheists. Nothing is going to put the issue of peak resources to bed unless or until the disastrous predictions begin to come true in an unmistakable fashion, so lets just sit back and enjoy the ride. Lets see what 2020 brings us.

If the peak resource issues become obvious, we can always blame the greens, the commos, the gays or the Government of the day. The list is endless and the Government powers will gloss it over anyway, so you'll never know the truth and that truth might just be that humanity has used the cheap and abundant energy in wood, then coal, then oil and finally gas to over-populate the planet to the point of no return where a crash of civilisation and a plunge in human numbers is the result.

But there is no imperative to conduct the research which I agree is so badly needed, BAYGON, and the reason for this is that oil is not yet in such short supply that its price has gone up sufficiently to cause people and governments to spend the billions of dollars needed to find alternatives to oil. Yes, I may be naive but, since 1972, world population has increased significantly yet global poverty has dropped in percentage and absolute terms. Some environmental problems have worsened while others have greatly improved, so the Club of Rome was wrong when it made it's dire predictions in 1972.
I see our greatest hope as GM plants being created that produce oil-like organic chemicals in their tissues that will then be harvested and refined to replace current fossil fuel oil resources. If this can be made to work, then we'll be using the sun to produce oil via photosynthesis.

Bernie - you are miles behind here in the energy debate. The alternatives don't currently exist and would take decades in any case to scale up to the level of energy use required. We don't have decades, we only have a few years.

And as for GM plants making oil etc - dream on. As a geneticist/biologist I can tell you that that is pipe dream. You need to consider the oil inputs into growing the plants, the energy provided by the sun per sqare metre, efficiency of photosynthesis etc. If you looked at that (and the competition of biofuels with our food supply) you would realise it is never going to happen.

People who make economics arguements need to put real numbers behind them instead of waving their hands and telling us that the market will "find a way".

Thanks, Mark, for an article that has implications far beyond Australia. You'd be surprised how many people in the northern hemisphere think of Australia as virgin territory, with lots of room for more people and lots of resources to be extracted. Much of this has to do with incrediby careless use of statistics; as well as worship of GNP, the God who has to be propitiated by being pumped up bigger and bigger all the time.

The prospect of having civilisation as we know it completely collapse is, I've always thought, an intrinsic part of the human condition.

On an individual level it's easy to imagine simply going back to the kind of life we had in the 19th century, when we had Daisy and our chooks and before our use of energy skyrocketed, but that's not going to be possible for everyone. If there does turn out to be an energy crisis, then we will inevitably see a period of famine and social disorder the like of which we post-WW2 dwellers are scarcely able to contemplate.

I don't think it's unreasonable to appeal to economic factors in situations like this. There will be some element of market forces giving rise to hitherto-unknown or uneconomic alternative technologies and this will offset the diminishing availability of oil somewhat. Every time an article such as this one is written, it will serve to encourage business to at least look into energy efficiency and alternative energy sources. It's pretty sensible to imagine that energy companies are probably obfuscating the actual state of energy reserves in order to protect their short term profitability (and perhaps unrealistic to expect these same companies are sufficiently prepared to weather the disappearance of their core business. Look at what happened to the photo processing and recorded music industries, and what's happening to retail, as precedents).

Mainly though I think the greatest usefulness of articles such as this is to point to the fact that we simply don't know what is going to happen in the future. We can speculate and/or appeal to scientific evidence all we like, but in situations like this we can only have confidence in our predictions when we are sure the factors we see as coming into play are 100% accurate - but given the manifest lack of clear consensus I think you'd have to say this isn't the case with energy.

Summing up, the only way to live happily is to crystallise your life down to its essence, and learn not to need anything that isn’t part of that

"... the only way to live happily is to crystallise your life down to its essence, and learn not to need anything that isn’t part of that."

not least jam sandwiches...