Another way of putting it, xoddam, is there are many who, for whatever reason, are not resourceful – maybe through a poor culture where education, science, technology the arts etc. do not flourish.

As to resources, it depends how far you think that we should go in
raping and pillaging the planet for human benefit and human population
growth. The price we pay for that is as yet unknown. At the moment
we are simply stealing more resources from other species, at their
expense.

Some people don't have a problem with wall to wall humans and concrete,
but personally I don't think its sustainable and will
eventually crash, as did the Easter Islanders etc. Some people
don't have a problem with wiping out more and more species for
human benefit. I think its a shame. I think other species deserve
a little bit of this planet too.

We are seeing the last of our closest relatives, ie other primates,
heading for extinction due to human population growth. In Africa,
forests are being chopped down for charcoal and shot out for
meat. Meantime the Catholic Church keeps up its anti birth control
policy, encouraging more and more little Catholics.

Our oceans are pretty well stuffed in terms of sustainability,
as EU fleets head for Africa, to plunder their fish. Mangroves,
which act as filters and breeding grounds, have been wiped out
in many places.

Yup, humans can eat something else, when they have wrecked one
particular environment. So there are other resources. Its a
moral argument, but I think that its a waste of one hell of a planet.

As resources become scarcer and more expensive, thats when you'll
see wars over them. We are a destructive species, we really are.

Most of you will be aware of the peak oil debate. There appears to be a consensus forming (and backed by the OECD's International Energy Agency) that by 2010 we will see the real start of the decline in oil. With it will go the growth economies.
That will be the beginning of the end of our current lifestyles.

(Get to the point!) Now I will get to the point. All the theory and pondering we can indulge in here will change to the severely practical on how to get by. Jobs will go, prices will go thru the roof and wars will get really serious.

Given this future, the question of what rationing system will work best is very important. Clever rationing of fuel may be the only path to a low energy lifestyle that prevents total collapse. Are our governments capable?

Maybe three years away, within the term of the next govt.

Michael,

There is no need to move to a "low energy lifestyle". Petroleum has, for over a century, been the cheapest form of transportable stored energy for machines, and it has facilitated much of the industrial revolution seen over that time.

But there is no shortage of energy in the world per se. Other forms of energy storage and transportation exist, and many of them do not cost very much more than petroleum does (some, indeed, are cheaper, and have only been suppressed to prevent competition). Our present overwhelming dependence on liquid fossil fuels looks alarming on the surface when you realise they aren't going to last forever and that production must decline, but there is sufficient oil still in the ground (indeed, roughly as much as has already been burned over 140 years) that really all we need to do is get used to paying more for our transportable stored energy. We already *do* pay more for petroleum. Other energy carriers are becoming increasingly competitive as a result. The market, in this case, will provide.

Peak Oil will hurt the people who are least prepared for it, and it will hurt those who are always hurt in a downturn. But it need not terminate the growth economy that oil enabled over the last century. We had growth before and we will have it after.

I *hope* that whatever economic crisis is precipitated by rising energy prices results also in more conclusive action to avert a catastrophic climate shift. This is likely but by no means certain; after all the world still has extensive reserves of other fossil fuels and it is far cheaper to exploit them with than without greenhouse gas pollution.

The climate crisis is far more desperate than the energy crisis. One is a mere matter of prices, in something that has always been dictated by the market. The other is a matter of uncosted and unpredictable changes in the very conditions of life on this planet, a destruction of enormous productive natural wealth that has never been measured or accounted for on anyone's balance sheet.