Well Warmair, I hope you are right, it would give me a warm feeling
for the future.
However I think you are too optimistic.

Re water, desalination is quite energy intense and true you could
supply only the lowest reservoirs and that would leave supply for the
highest places. However that I suspect is not real problem.
It is the expansion of population to new towns and increasing food
production. We have to cater for times of drought not times of normal rain.
You said:-but food will become relatively more expensive primarily due
high cost of liquid fuels for agricultural equipment.

I agree this is a critical point, if we can solve the electrical
generation problem then we can electrify farming with some difficulties
and new/old techniques. In oldern times ploughing was done by using
a steam tractor at one side of a paddock and a cable to pull ploughs
back an forth. An electric motor could be used in a similar way.
Perhaps a better way would be overhead wires ah la trolley busses.

It is not done that way now because fuel is so cheap.
Re the VFT, I suspect that we will never be able to finance such a
project. It is not generally understood that the VFT construction is
very different to other rail construction.
That is why I propose the "Fast Enough" train project.
We already have the rolling stock in NSW which is capable of speeds
over 125 Miles Per Hour as they are in fact the UK 125s.
They could easily halve the time Sydney to Melbourne.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtcIc05ZdVg

There are many of these videos. It would need track straightening
and track upgraded to higher UK standards.
That is what we can afford.

Dear Foxy
Current world consumption of oil is 93 million barrels of oil a day or 33 billion barrels of oil per year and this is increasing by about 2% per year so if we continue on our current path we would be using 66 billion barrels of oil a year by 2050, but as we are only discovering about 16 billion barrels of oil and gas combined per year, this will force us to consider alternatives such as oil shale and tar sands. The alternatives are more expensive than conventional oil and have higher CO2 emissions, which will be subject to taxes or other limits. This is likely to make synthetic fuels using CO2 as part of the raw materials very likely to be competitive. The two obvious methods are photovoltaic solar power to generate all the raw materials needed or biological methods such as growing algae to produce synthetic oil.

High priced liquid fuels will have a drastic effect on transport which is why I think the VST will be built. There are cases where it is unlikely that there will be an alternative to the internal combustion engine, for example the electric tractor sounds to me to be highly improbable and impracticable. Food prices are bound to rise for this reason, plus fertilizes will also rise because many are currently produced from oil.

The amount of potential renewable energy available in Australia is many times greater than we will need for a very long time, we just have to go ahead and build the infrastructure which for Australia is technically easy. As I have mentioned else where Europe which is smaller in area than Australia currently produces over 3 times more renewable electrical energy than Australia consumes. Renewables do require energy storage, but again there are many ways of doing this.

It is generally accepted that growth is also closely related to energy consumption, as I don't see a problem in providing the extra energy needed in Australia I don't think that a lack of energy will be a limit to growth for us.

Bazz
If all the Australian cities recycle their water it would solve most the water problems.

The Perth"s desalination plant in least in theory is powered by renewable energy.

http://www.watercorporation.com.au/water-supply-and-services/solutions-to-perths-water-supply/desalination/southern-seawater-desalination-plant

Quote
"The plant’s energy requirements are offset by the entire output from two renewable energy farms near Geraldton."

While the VST may not be profitable now, the situation in 35 years time will be very different, for a start there will be many more people to pay for it, it will have a hefty price advantage over all its competitors and it will bring people into the heart of the cities without the traffic problems.

I've got a few more thoughts ...

As our demands increase in the future we're being
told by the experts that there will
undoubtedly be shortages and price increases.
In the case of vital commodities, the results could
be economic dislocation.

Oil is a non-renewable
resource which will inevitably be exhausted one
day. Some resources are plentiful -
we have coal deposits that will probably last for
centuries and can be burned to generate energy as
other resources fail. But the use of a resource
can't be considered in isolation from its potentially
complex environmental impacts.

Some experts glumly foresee a new era of scarcity, in which
economic growth would be replaced, at best, by economic
stability - and at worst, by economic shrinkage.
Others are highly optimistic that we can continue on our
present path, relying on technological innovations to solve
problems in the future, as they have done in the past.

One resource that is very much in short supply in this
country (and elsewhere), is fresh water.

Yet our modern society requires huge amounts of water for
domestic, agricultural, and industrial purposes.

We've seen the recent debate of the proposed mine in the
Liverpool Plains area - which has the richest agriculatural
land and farmers are depended on water from aquifers.
Risking the contamination of the aquifers and without a
dependable water supply this vital region could become
useless for agricultural purposes - a situation that could
cause food shortages and make the economic plight of
today's farmers pale by comparison.

The favoured fix is not to allow mining in areas such as this.
Or possibly as some have suggested to pipe water from
other sources, hundreds of miles away - which could prove to
be a very expensive undertaking and possibly not a viable one.

As I stated earlier - I certainly don't have the answers -
but our future does depend on the decisions we make today -
and that does mean as stated previously that we need to get some
early insights into what our choices are.

Dear Warmair,

Thanks for your continued ideas.

I hope that you're right.

Foxy, many place their hopes on technological developments.
The problem is that those developments are always subject to diminishing returns.
What I mean is that in any field it becomes more and more difficult to
get an improvement in the system.
It is a variation of the lowest hanging fruit syndrome.

Energy Return on Energy Invested is another example of this.
The ERoEI of oil has fallen from 100 to now about 10 averaged over the
world so it is now warning that it will not be practical to continue
searching for new fields. This search & development cost can be seen
in the financial problems of the major oil companies.
BP's of course is well known, Shell is selling assets to pay dividends
Mobils CEO has been complaining of their expenses in search.
The minors in tight shale oil are in great difficulty with bankruptcies
starting to appear.

Coal is better off especially in Australia. It is a problem in the US
with the quality declining. The ERoEI has fallen from 80 to 30 so it
has a way to go yet.

Just note how many times you hear politicians making noises about growth.
Labour & Libs are promising growth, watch the BBC news and see how
many world politicians are promising growth.

It is signals all over. Trouble is the pollies can't hear them.