Agronomist is speaking some sense.. as for being in a pattern of denial as accused by Divergence... You guys are seriously concerning yourself with a dud report justly dismissed 30 years ago, quoting reports about food shortages that are mainly lobbying documents and ignoring strong evidence concerning major reductions in poverty (changes in both China and India), as well as strong evidence of long-term-real reductions in prices for all commodities (one of the major reasons LtG has been largely forgotten, aside from some green groups) and I'm the one in denial? Okay, well it must all be true then.

Actually the last line of my previous message should have been "there is nothing MORE vulnerable to resource shortages than a system operating at close to 100% efficiency" (so we certainly don't want to double our population just because we think we currently have the capacity to).

One problem with discussions of oil vulnerability is that many people seem to assume we are operating in a command economy where oil will be diverted to agriculture as needed. One hopes that such will be the case but it is by no means certain. Declining oil supplies is likely to cause supplies to become much more subject to disruption (through conflict, lower stocks etc.) and this is a real worry for ag production. We have already had problems with diesel supplies around harvest time in SA previously since out storage capacity is so small. Rising oil prices also put great financial pressure on farmers (who are already under great stress there) and could force them to the wall before the government decides to do anything about it. Once they are gone they are gone....

Michael Lardelli

You may be correct about Peak oil, it is not my subject. However, on general grounds there will be clearly many different opinions on this matter.

Here is a preliminary report of a vast new oil deposit in North Dakota.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D99EAOH01&show_article=1

I think there are 2 different types of "optimism" here. One is that in which economic, population, resource consumption, etc. growth can keep on going unbridled. This optimism is foolish, as the article suggests. But who is to say that "growth" (i.e. materialistic growth) is only way things can be "good", i.e. why does "growth" = "good"? This paradigm of "growth" = "good" must change -- including the idea that more, more, more _material_ things (i.e. materialism) is a disaster. Agreed.

But I don't believe that idea that the only way one can be happy and that things can be good is with ever more materialism and material growth, which is what _seems_ to be being touted here as it just says "optimism" with no further qualification, is bad. I believe we don't need all that stuff. So I would have the other optimism: that we can have a world that is better than the one we have now. But where "better" here does _not_ equal "ever more material things" and "ever more GROWTH". The idea that a world without this type of "GROWTH" and stuff is going to be "bad" still seems like, well, stuck in the very materialist paradigm one is critiquing.

Now as for getting there, that may be rough. And it will be rougher the more we try to stick to the materialistic stuff.

Another false equation that pops up all too often is "progress = materialistic growth". I challenge that one too. Nonmaterial progress is sorely lacking in a lot of places, and ultimately this underpins all the other problems and is the very reason we make such false equations.

Michael there is room for optimism. In your article you say

"Now that energy is declining there will not be enough to invest in building the alternative energy future that many of us dream of."

This implies that we are running out of energy so fast we do not have enough energy to build and energy alternative future. Luckily this is not the case - although we do have start quickly. The reason it is not the case is that we know that each time we double our capacity of any technology it reduces in costs and energy to produce by some percentage. It is likely that on average renewables will come down in energy cost by about 20% each time we double capacity. As we have many doublings to go we can take today's capacity, work out how many doublings and find an energy cost.

My calculations show that by the time we have replaced fossil fuels we will be producing energy at well below half the current cost both in energy and money.

Of course the sooner we start the "doublings" the better.

The good news - which might seem bad to some - is that solar and geothermal renewables are a fraction of 1% so it does not take too many doublings to get the energy cost of these systems down.

However we have to start sometime and the longer we wait the more difficult it gets so the message is to start to direct investment to renewables in a massive way and we might just get through this.

Anti-Green,

A thousand barrels a day is not a lot when the world wants to 84 million barrels of oil a day. The oil field would need to be the size of Saudi Arabia which I doubt it is. Even if it where it only delays the inevitable.

Ficke Pickle, renewables are never going to make up for loss of oil (in The Last Oil shock David Strahan estimated you'd need a wind farm the size of Wales to run England's car fleet alone on electricity). I don't see many wind turbine factories being built here.

Australia is not moving towards them in any way shape or form and that is the issue. By the time people realize it will be too late. Does anyone here think our current political system is up for this kind of challenge?

Cheap energy is utterly vital to our current economy -- oil reached its highest cost right before the g.f.c hit. If we don't have the cheap energy then its a feed back loop going down, not up.

But as I said before, we'll all get to see who's right.