KAEP, the problem with Nuclear is that we're not overflowing with nuclear technicians - we don't as a country, and probably as a planet, have the skills to run hundreds of nuclear reactors. Neither do we have the uranium, which itself is at or near peak (see http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379, http://home.austarnet.com.au/davekimble/peakuranium.htm).

Anyway, nuclear, geothermal & solar will only generate electricity. They won't produce fuel for your internal combustion engine. Do we really think that all our ICE-driven cars & trucks will somehow be converted to electric in a short time-span? Or to any other significantly-different fuel for that matter? If not, petrol & diesel will still be needed to drive the machines that mine our minerals, cultivate our fields and transport our food.

Certainly there should be massive & urgent investment into the research and manufacture of alternate energy sources. There should also be a huge effort put into public transport instead of motorways, and planning for austerity measures that will substantially reduce non-essential fuel usage, balanced by subsidies for agricultural and vital transport usage. Our refineries should be upgraded so that they can process fuel from our own (declining) oil reserves as well.

People will need to get to & from work - how will this happen if they can't afford to use their cars, but are stuck with public transport that's geared for far fewer passengers? They'll need to eat - how will this happen if it becomes to expensive for farmers to fuel their tractors or for food to be transported from farms to supermarkets?

I guess its easier for our beloved leaders to dismiss all this as Chicken Little alarmism, and just continue just do & say nothing about it. It'll be business as usual until the sky really does fall in.

Apart from the peaking of oil, I suggest we will also experience a peaking of lifestyle in this country (Australia), but it's not going to happen over night.

The population explosion has occurred ONLY because of cheap and abundant energy in the form of fossil fuels. If you follow a population growth graph, you'll immediately notice that it correlates to the rise in the use of fossil fuels. Our lifestyle has increased in much the same manner. One barrel of oil, for example, equals 25,000 man hours of energy. Nothing can replace compact energy like that, so as oil becomes increasingly expensive and all other fossil fuels too, we will see an unending decline in our lifestyles right back to the point whereby people do indeed begin to die.

Without the energy provided by cheap and abundant oil, everything will have to be done with greater and greater human labor input, but I rather believe that peak oil will be more like a roller-coaster event than anything quick and abysmal. We will see rays of hope on the horizon, only to see then dashed within weeks. There will be new discoveries, but not enough energy to exploit them. Such will be our lot. The rich will have no need of money, the sick will fade away, the thrifty will be lords of their communities, the lazy will plunder, then be killed.

Welcome to the "Old World."

Peak Oil has a lot in similar with Climate Change. Both require urgent action to avert their worst effects, and both needed that action to begin a decade or more ago.

Both also have a huge number of sceptics in positions of political and economic power, and that's the real problem. A "believer" will (or should) take steps to cope with the problem & hopefully avoid its worst effects, while a skeptic will keep acting as if our current way of life and economic growth can go on forever.

What are the downsides of the believer's actions if the catastrophe (Peak Oil or Climate Change) doesn't happen? Well, they'll have spent a lot of money switching to cleaner, renewable sources of energy and transformed from "going for growth" to a goal of sustainable existence in balance with the environment. There would have been social upheaval & unrest, but at the end there'd be many new energy industries to balance the decline of the old fossil-fuel ones. We'd have cleaner air and no worries about our fuel running out. When Peak Oil does hit, we'd be well place to export technology and expertise to the rest of the world. Its hard to see a negative long-term consequence here.

However, what are the downsides of the sceptic's non-action if the catastrophes they're ignoring do happen? Utter failure to prepare as a nation, resulting in the permanent disintegration of modern society & rapid loss of population. The thing is, Peak Oil _will_ happen - its a certainty, just a question of how quickly.

continued in the next post...

Aime,

Your oil/population correlation is facile and wrong. Population growth has *always* been exponential. Population has only ever stabilised in energy-rich societies.

20th century population growth was fastest in oil-poor countries such as the Indian subcontinent, Mexico and China, far outstripping the prosperous and profligate OECD and the oil-rich Soviet bloc.

During and after the oil "shocks" of the 1970s, all oil-importing nations decreased consumption. Population did not fall correspondingly.

It is technically simple, with some effort and political will, to break the back of our present excessively heavy reliance on oil.

We just have to stop wasting the stuff. Changing our habits with decent mass transit and some gentle arm-twisting in the form of congestion charges (and fuel rationing as the crunch looms) would mostly eliminate unnecessary and discretionary urban oil consumption, which accounts for half of the total demand. High prices can achieve the same, but since they are already "destroying" demand amongst the poorest consumers rather than the most wasteful ones, the implications are iniquitous.

Technological change should not be underestimated; it is the modern norm. 80% savings in gross liquid fuel requirements are achievable with technology that is already commonplace; all that's lacking is regulatory incentives to accelerate adoption. Saving fuel is cheaper than buying it; any pain caused by "austerity measures" need only be temporary.

Technical energy efficiency improvements typically reduce the whole economy's gross energy intensity by 1% per year, in the absence of any incentive but economy. High prices strengthen that incentive, There is room for a political mandate to strengthen it five- or ten-fold more, simply by subsidising efficient equipment and penalising waste.

The biggest obstacle to change is the risk that oil prices may fall again before the peak is obvious. For ten years now the price signal of the imminent peak has been hidden in the noise.

KAEP persistently ignores the vast thermodynamic wealth of existing terrestrial resources other than his nuclear and geothermal hobbyhorses. Concentrating the energy of the sunlight that reaches Earth is a simple matter of mirrors, photosynthesis, compost and pyrolysis.

Pollyanna ... er Xoddamn

So oil prices are going to fall and human beings will all cooperate with each other when fuel is too expensive for law and order infrastructure to operate effectively. Oh and wanda is for black people and it cant happen to white dudes like you. And best of all, solar, wind and biomess can supply more than 20% of our energy needs.

Snap-out-of-it artilleryman!

Humans are thermodynamic machines. When you strip away all the civilised niceties, Civilisations, groups of humans, are also thermodynamic machines and as such obey the laws of physics. We know from examples of the application of those laws in other areas such as hurricane formations that when you have large, rapid changes in energy inputs then you get CHAOTIC response solutions involving a trajectory of the system between specific endpoints.

Those endpoints for humans are the 2billion population of pre-oil 1900 to the 9billion post oil population of 2025. The difference in population will die-off. Its that simple. Anyone with a modicum of real-life-experience and understands the real-Rwanda KNOWS this: http://dieoff.org/

Australia is running-out-of-time:

1 Stop IMMIGRATION. You wouldn't have flown in plane loads of bull-dogs before the Titanic hit the iceberg. We musn't fly in plane loads of aggressive migrants NOW near PEAKOIL anarchy. PEAKOIL will hell-raise enough anarchy without extras.

To view immigrants as GST revenue and captive votes for incumbent governments is a John Howard BETRAYAL of the Australian people. Immigration used to grow economy is a phoney. The $A value will be wiped out within a decade as world-currencies fall and revalue to nuclear, coal and geothermal energy stocks.

2. Go Total-nuclear-Industries(TNI) as a bridge over PEAKOIL and to build up future nuclear proficiency for R&D into the holy energy grail of nuclear fusion. Value added TNI exports like PBR fuel and mini reactors can more than double the loss of income from ceasing immigration. Further, such revenue will not devalue at PEAKOIL.

3. Bypass oil companies and invest in new laser drilling technologies to get HOT-ROCK-GEOTHERMAL power stations for all capital cities within a decade or sooner.

Keap,

I don't think nuclear is going to be able to replace oil. In any event nuclear material will peak in about 30 years time (and that's assuming demand stays at it current level) -- you can re process uranium but I'd suggest more weapon capable material in an unstable world is not such a good idea.

If we can maintain the electricity grid then we can probably still run some kind of transport system and hence some kind of economy -- there is not way its going to be able to cover the transition from oil though.

David Strahan in his book "The Last Oil Shock" calculated you'd need a wind farm the size of Wales (in the uk) to provide enough power to run the transport system alone.

I'd also suggest to everyone that there could well be mass starvation; if the worlds population has grown due to the use of oil in agriculture what happens when you take it away?