This is a good summary of Peak Oil, but the impacts of Peak Oil are worse than Mr. Dunlop indicates.

According to energy investment banker Matthew Simmons and most independent analysts, global oil production is now declining, from 74 million barrels per day to 60 million barrels per day by 2015. During the same time demand will increase 14%.

This is equivalent to a 33% drop in 7 years. No one can reverse this trend, nor can we conserve our way out of this catastrophe. Because the demand for oil is so high, it will always be higher than production; thus the depletion rate will continue until all recoverable oil is extracted.

Alternatives will not even begin to fill the gap. And most alternatives yield electric power, but we need liquid fuels for tractors/combines, 18 wheel trucks, trains, ships, and mining equipment.

Surviving Peak Oil: We are facing the collapse of the highways that depend on diesel trucks for maintenance of bridges, cleaning culverts to avoid road washouts, snow plowing, roadbed and surface repair. When the highways fail, so will the power grid, as highways carry the parts, transformers, steel for pylons, and high tension cables, all from far away. With the highways out, there will be no food coming in from "outside," and without the power grid virtually nothing works, including home heating, pumping of gasoline and diesel, airports, communications, and automated systems.

This is documented in a free 48 page report that can be downloaded, website posted, distributed, and emailed: http://www.peakoilassociates.com/POAnalysis.html

I used to live in NH-USA, but moved to a sustainable place. Anyone interested in relocating to a nice, pretty, sustainable area with a good climate and good soil? Email: clifford dot wirth at yahoo dot com or give me a phone call which operates here as my old USA-NH number 603-668-4207. http://survivingpeakoil.blogspot.com/

I think there is little alternative to radical conservation and lifestyle change. Despite empty talk on carbon cutbacks we will try to substitute coal (eg to power desalination) for another decade or so until even that becomes prohibitive. A switch to compressed natural gas for heavy vehicles seems prudent and luckily Australia seems to have several decades gas supply unless it is sold off overseas or squandered on baseload generation. I expect most forms of renewable energy to have trouble scaling up because of their cost and variable output following an era when energy has been ultra cheap and reliable. There won't be hundreds of billions of dollars of capital available for squeaky clean energy sources or huge infrastructure changes. We need to set course for these changes immediately because the pain will only get worse.

The big gorrilla in the tent is not really peak oil or global warming (a.k.a.: climate change for those in deny-all). Peak oil and global warming are only $YMPTOMS of the aformentioned gorrilla.

The big gorrilla is THE DOCTRINE OF PERPETUAL GROWTH of the human population and the world economy on a HOST ORGANISM of limited space and FINITE resources. THE DOCTRINE OF PERPETUAL GROWTH has been synonymous with "progress"... but OLD COYOTE KNOSE that it's really CANCER! Let me emphasize and reiterate the term: CANCER!

Chanting and praying to dead prophets revered in outdated dogma (the bible)... or tax cuts for the rich for the $ake of the other profits will not save humanity (a.k.a.: ewe-man-unkind) from suffering an extinction event. Common sense, however, might give us an esporting chance. We are going to re-evaluate our attitude and relationship with the Earth (the host organism) or we're going to be EXTINCT!

The KNOSE knows that ewe folks out there have less than ten years to get your act together... which means abandoning tribe-all-eeego and outdated religious dogmas (a.k.a.: dog-mess). Ten years!

(hi cliff and tassie)

It's hard to credit that here in Victoria, we are still timidly playing with band-aid solutions for our 19th Century rail network. Jeepers, we ought to be creating a 21st Century rail network, while the sufficiency of liquid fuel puts that task within easy reach.

The "information super highway" is almost too obvious to mention - except we have to repeat the mantra to get it through political-financial-corporate thick skulls. While we're at it, let's send the whole woodpulp-paper cancer the way of the celluloid photograph - and good riddance!

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The geopolitical angle is not so easy to deal with though. I think it's fair to say that any mechanised military force would be scrap iron without abundant fuel.

By the rules of this century old game, the war-toys must come first. The Pentagon clowns in stupid hats can't imagine it otherwise. And let's face it, they have led the most peculiar sheltered existence in their five-sided asylum.

Eventually, it may simply be the rest of the world competing for the Pentagon's energy pool. Then what difference will it make what country you come from?

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“We must leave oil before it leaves us”.

- I really dig that -

What is so depressing about this article and in fact most other forum discussions on climate change is that we in Australia have great opportunities to change the way we use/generate energy and yet we don't!

I subscribe to an email newsletter from www.solarbuzz.com that reports news item regarding global rollout of "green energy". This is a "techie" industry newsletter but is easy reading.

Week in week out they chronicle countries around the world such as Germany, too numerous to mention US states, China etc all creating businesses, jobs and drastically changing their dependence on fossil fuel and here we are; with the greatest access to solar energy on the planet and we still wonder what we are going to do with our coal industries vis a vis sequestration etc....

Who said some decades ago that we would become the "knowledge" country?

Nice one Guy. Capitalism as we know it cannot endure declining oil production and you've pretty well nailed it. It ain't love that makes the world go round, it's the profit motive.

Once oil does become scarce we'll be forced to look at alternatives. Peter King your time will come but oh so slowly and certainly not when there's a profit to be made by doing nothing.

I'm waiting for some journo from the AFR to put in his two bob's worth. It'll come, and just as predictably it'll point out Malthus was wrong and thus so are we.