The party's over alright. And the implications for food security are huge. If Michaux is right when he says peak total energy is projected to be approximately in the year 2017, then we really had better start preparing as a society. Energy, after all, is what makes the world goes round, that is, it provides us with goods and especially food. We had better start reining in population growth before people starve.

The new Abbott Government and, in particular, Malcolm Turnbull, would do well to look at the graph with copper declining dramatically. Fibre optics, it would seem, was always the better option.

My prediction

The coming epidemic (bird/pig flu, HIV, something completely new) will cause people to hide away as much as possible and as a result spend more time learning, thinking and organising via the internet which will lead to a new form of inclusive democracy that eschews the type of economy we now have for a more sustainable economy.
Think small craft type organisations making goods that last not throw away consumerism.
Intellectual property will be subsumed by crowd sourced and peer to peer methods of innovation and progress.
Co-operative businesses will out-compete large corporations (who will be desperately trying to hold onto the old ways) and governments will lose their power to NGOs, charities, online groups and people power.

The media, hollywood, the music industry and the churches will die out.

There will be less demand for resources(hence the original article is irrelevant), less waste, probably less people (many will die in the epidemic) and the planets climate will be harsher. People will think and behave differently. There will still be wealthy and wasteful people but most of us will be happy with a roof over our heads, food and an internet connection. Going out, traveling, congregating in large groups is likely to be seen as risky and we will happily forgo it all.

Since it is not the few well off that cause the problems of pollution, overcrowding, scarcity and climate change but the vast masses. When they start to live more sustainably then things really will change.

No one will find it too onerous, indeed many will find it comforting and civilised not to have to compete in what has become an unhealthy rat race of consumption and affluenza. The old ways and the old corporations will die(they already are) and be replaced by a less hierarchical, less centralised and less damaging system that will quite probably lead to many great advances. Pity about the environmental disasters that will inevitably come along as well.

Just my opinion but when it comes to the crunch history has shown that us humans usually get it right in the end.

Mikk

If you want internet connection then you want the minerals that make it happen, not least copper now the Liberals are in power and dispensing with fibre optics for copper in the NBN. And if you read the article, you'd know that the only way we're going to maintain copper supplies is by digging ever deeper and wider and using more energy and water to extract it. Energy, however, will peak in 2017. So yes, we do need a simpler life-style, permaculture and all that, but we'll be lucky to hang on to the internet unless we make some good long-term plans in energy and resource management.

I think people will make the effort to hold on to things like the internet while happily letting go of other far more resource intensive activities, like flying, travel in general, consumption on all levels. This will leave plenty of resources for what people see as really important. Sustainable power and intelligent grids, telecommunications and connectivity, replacement logistics and supply chains to cater for the new way of doing things.

In some ways it all hinges on an epidemic happening and I think with current population and overcrowding it is inevitable. I dont know when but we have already been given a few warnings and there will probably be a few more. But as usual we as a species will ignore them and then it will be too late. Millions will die, in pain and agony and life as we know it will be transformed. Why do people always have to die before we do something?

Also as for copper I think you will find that you have to include almost all existing stocks as i believe it is the most valuable recycled commodity out there and recovery rates are very high and will stay that way into the future. Even more so if the price of copper keeps rising. I know my employers will be happy.

Not to mention the inevitability that we will have fibre no matter what the Luddites and penny pinchers (lol no pun intended) in the lieberal party do.

The author under-rates (ignores?) the way higher prices for energy make larger amounts of energy resources more economical to extract.

Also - due to the backhanded benefits of global warming - large areas of the Arctic are becoming economical for the extraction of oil and gas. Basically the ice is gradually melting making Arctic oil rigs and shipping to and from them economic propositions.

"The exploration of the Arctic for petroleum is more technically challenging than for any other environment. However, with increases in technology, continuing high oil prices and drastic melting of glaciers and ice due to global warming (making it easier to drill and explore), the region is now receiving the interest of the petroleum industry." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_exploration_in_the_Arctic

In any case minerals and energy resources have always been seen as high risk commodities. Prices changes leave predictions of permanent doom temporary.

Pete

What an enormous pity it was that Labor couldn’t see the necessity in steering its policy platform towards a sustainable Australia.

It was desperately seeking a major revamp. It had Gillard’s ‘sustainable Australia’ desire still prominently in their minds, which had been widely supported by the general community. And it has Bob Carr and Kelvin Thomson, who have both been very vocal on sustainability issues for a long time.

And yet it has gone with an absolutely entrenched same-old-continuous-growth, ‘big Australia’ advocate in Bill Shorten as their new leader, and just completely muffed the incredible chance it had to take Australian politics in the direction that it desperately needs to go.

And as for the Greens, which is the party that should have been howling ‘sustainability’ from the rooftops right from its inception, they’ve just completely foregone any real action on this; the most important green, environmental, economic and social issue of all.

So, one has got to wonder; what on earth is it going to take to get us to move in a meaningful way towards a sustainable future?

As Simon Michaux points out; crunch time approaches. It’s as obvious as dog-balls. And yet here we are, still blundering on with the same old approach, which might have worked well a few decades ago, but which hasn’t worked at all well for a long time, and which is just rapidly taking us towards this crunch point.

Run run a wolf.

Plantagenet
It does not matter what the price is if you get less energy from the oil you dig up than you spent digging it up then it is over.
Once it takes a barrel of oil to dig up a barrel of oil then its game over.

mikk

If only a world without Government subsidise, business cross-subsidisation and sundry other economic distortions, were that simple.

I'll even throw in fast breeder reactors providing power for advanced battery run diggers.

Cheers

Pete

A large coal mining drag line could easily be powered by a sealed nuclear power unit, very similar to those used in US subs, as could the crusher washer system.

Hell in 50 years we will probably have a chip of uranium, enough to power our cars for their lifetime, added on the assembly line.

GOD, is it a new Millennium already? We're all doomed, peak, oil, copper, coral, ....., repent, repent. Been hearing this since high school in the 70's, that Clubhouse in Rome moves about a lot; the only thing that changes is the date. I really miss the demise of organised religion, it gave a harmless outlet for hand wringers.

The latest updates on Limits to Growth from the Club of Rome show that we are on track for collapse in the 2030s. This article by Simon Michaux illustrates why. Nuclear is not going to save us. Renewables just might but we have to ensure we direct remaining fossil fuel energy and minerals to their development and distribution.

One factor that the article fails to discuss is the massive trade in recycling metals, which is a great deal cheaper to do than extracting them. For example, aluminium is just 5% as energetically costly to re-smelt as it is to extract and refine, even including the cost of collecting and sorting scrap. There are enormous smelters in Asia (most notably China, but also Malaysia has large capacity, owned by many of the same groups as the Chinese plant) that have specialised in recycling, to such good effect that some have been shut down deliberately to reduce the oversupply of some metals on the world market; aluminium re-smelt capacity has been reduced by over 600,000tonnes/annum in China this year. Copper is also in good supply.

www.lme.com

Our own re-smelting operations are much less significant and also shrinking. The Alcoa smelter at Geelong will soon be closed because of its age and won't be replaced. We have protective anti-dumping tariffs to protect those smelters, but it is hard to see how that is really justified, especially since it only applies to Chinese product and it's not really that hard for a Chinese operator to send ingots to Malaysia for re-shipping to Australia as though it was Malaysian product and thus avoid the tariff. The same goes for extruded product, which is considerably cheaper than our local product, for no really good reason other than the cost of capital, since labour is a tiny part of the cost of manufacture. The

An increase in the cost of extraction will make re-smelt even more attractive and changing technologies will change the supply and demand profile significantly as well, reducing the need for extraction, as well as increasing the supply of recycled material. I don't think that the rest of us need to worry too much, but the mining sector certainly has a problem. Sooner or later, possibly within the next few decades, there will no longer be a need for any mining of some metals, since the demand is driven by an increase in population/changes in living standards and that will not last.