"Money measures the scope of dreams, but only energy can fulfil them."

Beautiful line Chris! The failure of economists to understand that things happen due to energy rather than money amazes and saddens me. Your piece shows the fallacy of the "we'll do something when the problem arises" syndrome. When the problems from oil depletion come, there will be little energy to do anything about them. All infrastructure project costs will skyrocket. We will indeed be chasing our shadows!

Important ideas, interestingly expressed. As someone with engineering and economics education, I am frustrated by the failure of economic policymakers to see the huge significance of the coming peak oil scenario and the inescapabability of physical laws of thermodynamics and entropy. Non-scientists expect science to produce miracles – to create something out of nothing. Science cannot do this.The supply of stored non-renewable energy on this earth is finite. As it runs down and gets more energy-expensive to access, everything in our physical world must change.

Of course, we should be using the precious time we still have, while non-renewable energy is still cheap, to use that energy to build the physical infrastructure we will soon need, if we are to live in a renewables-energy based world. When oil prices go through the roof, it will be immeasurably harder to find the spare resources to build arrays of solar reflector towers, wind-powered turbines, tidal power stations, etc. That’s why every year, every month, now counts.

I am not defeatist – we can still move to a renewable-energy based world which could maintain a decent shared living standard (though not the profligate living standard we “enjoy” now). But the longer we delay the physical engineering of that unavoidable transition, the harder it will be for our children to build or find the resources of concrete, steel, plastics etc to build those new infrastructures. The tragedy is that our children’s society may be too poor to build these things, when we could now so easily be doing it for them.

And Chris is right to say how we are criminally wasting much of the low-cost oil we still have, on competitive military consumption of energy and materials. We need a global approach based on the principle of common humanity – for we are all in this together. National sovereign-state competition to control diminishing resources of non-renewables will lead us inevitably in the end into a Mad Max world. of failed states and utter local anarchy. We don’t have a great deal of time to avoid descent into that kind of world

Yep, thanks for the commonsensical enlightenmemt, Chris, and thanks to his supporters so far.

Though going on 87, and losing one's thinking powers more than a bit, suddenly came up with an appropriate term for our present economy.

What came up was an old colonial one called the quarry economy, and could reckon it fits us Aussies now to a T.

Certainly without our fortunate pitstocks, after our wool and wheat and even meat has lost favour, the rocks and gravel that spoilt the look of our farm and station back paddocks, had may be given us too much indication of the wealth beneath.

As with most of the earlier goldmines with expensive infrastructure galore to handle the ore, etc, there was also talk in the pubs that when the gold ran out, all the structures would be pulled down and left to rot and rust.

Reckon we have been fortunate that our former low-grade pitstocks are now in such demand from China and India, and wonder if with China we are building up a political
economy for them, which as we dig, they modernise to such an extent we are left lacking in the very infastructural activity we helped them build.

So as regards the seemingly never-ending university study term The Changing Global Political Economy, such might place Australia on the economic downgrade, relying too much on very much expendable quarry economics.

Demos,

I started paying attention about 3 years ago and its been downhill ever since....

I can't see that our current crop of polies/business leaders have any notion of what's going on or much less what to do about it.

Don't worry - be happy. The american bible bashing right who (via George Bush, Tony Blair et al including our own Jahn) control just about everything in the world have it all worked out for us. Jesus is coming back and the energy crisis will be no more. Let the suicide bombers have their bevy of nubile virgins - we have Jesus!

One thing about quicksands is that your footprint is soon erased. Why do we get so upset? Our "civilisation" will decline and disappear, as so many have before. Why do we cling so desperately to the notion that somehow we have to survive? I have to admit that the appeal to the future of our grandchildren is a very powerful one. But relax everyone and get on with your lives - though watch out for the quicksand. Maybe man on this planet is not destined to prolong much longer (though in fact I have faith that our desperation and ingenuity in science will extend human supremacy for a long time), maybe other species will become dominant. Who cares? and if we do care, why?