I tend to agree we're headed for tough times regardless. A likely scenario is stagflation with fuel induced price rices but no improvement in activities other perhaps than exports to China. Because the magnitude of the problem will take a while to sink in I think 2006 will be a year of talk but not much action. We'll continue to engage in unprotected coal burning while clean coal and hydrogen make little if any progress. Ethanol and wind farms should pick up. Nuclear power which should have been started ten years ago will again be put in the too hard basket. No doubt there will be climate dramas like a cyclone dipping well south. Meanwhile the paradigm shift in attitudes to energy will inch closer.

The article raises a lot of good points, although this topic is too involved for a 1500 word article.

One thing needs to be corrected. The only way that Australia has "coal for hundreds of years," is:
1. if no coal is used to replace natural gas and petroleum,
2. if there is no increase in population and consumption rate and
3. if there are no exports.
This "hundreds of years" calculation is made by dividing reserves by current usage. Current usage is set to increase significantly, especially after gas and oil start running low and get really expensive. When coal is used to replace petroleum, energy is lost because the conversion from solid to liquid or solid to electricity requires energy. In other words a Billion kilojoules of coal does not replace a Billion kilojoules of petroleum.

You can't have your coal for hundreds of years and not export it. It is unlikely that the government would nationalise the coal industry to prevent coal exports. Population and consumption are rising around the world, regrettably that is unlikely to change any time soon, so the demand for exports will continue to increase. It is likely that Australian coal exports will increase to meet the demands of increasing population and consumption.

I can't criticise Mr. August too severely, because the federal government makes the same assumptions, but it just isn't likely to work out this way. We will start using a lot more coal and it will start running out a lot quicker than hundreds of years.

Some estimates have oil at US$200 a barrell before its all over. Within the next 20 yrs.

My crystal ball says... buy oil stocks.

Those, likely runaway, profits should go a long way to financing our energy expensive futures.

Oops, forgot, sans a scientific break through of Einsteinian proportions or a new, cheap and abundant as yet undiscovered oil source, there will be no future like our present. Our greedy past and present has already stolen the future.

Damn, all those Chinese and Indians pursuing a soon to be achieved middle-class consumerist bliss are greedily stealing what we are trying to steal before it gone.

Gonna get very bad before it improves.