DH thinks he's wrong--that once oil hits $200/barrel, solar and wind power will be a lot more popular, and nuclear power won't skeeve people anywhere near so much, etc.

Yeah, there's oil located where the benefits of drilling and refining don't justify the cost. But at $200 a barrel it does. Not that oil is infinite, but there are energy technologies that are simply too costly now while we have cheap oil, and become more attractive when oil is expensive.

I guess you could put it down because any assumption that is premised on an 80% reduction in the world's population and a retardation of 200 years of technology is far-fetched. But I haven't read the book.

xpost.

Most food grown nearby, heavily agricultural workforce, etc. Lots of famine, disease, and war to get rid of the extra 5-6 billion.

Nah. There are other ways to power vehicles and agricultural equipment. Lack of fresh water will be the bigger problem of the future. OTOH, maybe global warming will lead to a huge release of methane from the seas and we'll all just get wiped out.

I guess you could put it down because any assumption that is premised on an 80% reduction in the world's population and a retardation of 200 years of technology is far-fetched. But I haven't read the book.

He wasn't saying technology, to my reading of what Susan said. Primarily population and supply-system patterns

Susan, there's an article in last month's National Geographic that talks about what we're going to do after oil. It's alarmist, but in that measured National Geographic way, and it presents a lot of possibilities/alternatives that we can pursue and that some places are implementing now. They don't buy the 80% reduction/1800's technology reversion theory - not really. They do think we're headed for disaster if we don't find something to replace oil, but that's nothing new.

ita, insent to profile addy.

My personal favourite disaster scenario is another flu pandemic. We cosy first-worlders will probably be spared the worst of it, but up to 5% of the world's population died in the 1918 outbreak, and we're more overpopulated now than then. Even if the disease itself didn't do so much damage, the economic impact would be pretty severe.

Yes, I was one of those kids who cried themselves to sleep at night convinced I was going to wake up to a nuclear holocaust, why do you ask?

The problem is not so much that oil is gonna run out, but that at some point oil production will peak, and as oil gets harder and harder to extract the world's oil production will start to decline, or at least it will be unable to keep on growing to meet demand. This will result in much higher oil prices, shortages, etc.

There's a lot more to all this, but I'm busy at the moment so....

Short version is that for a typical oil field, once half the oil is gone, the remaing half gets harder and harder to get out, so that field's production will peak at the half-gone point and decline after that. This can also be applied to countries, such as the US (where our oil production peaked around '71 IIRC) and Saudia Arabia, where some think this will happen in the next ten years....

cereal:

Excerpt of oil article here.

We have the science and technology to provide alternatives to oil and gas. But we won't fully exploit them until oil is so expensive that we have no choice.

I'm worried, obviously, but not in full panic mode just yet. When prices force people to think about the way they use petroleum, things will change.

For one thing, they didn't have Miracle Gro in 1800.

For another, I delight in reading articles about people who drive their cars on corn oil. (Apparently they smell like popcorn driving by, and it's illegal in the UK because it's an attempt to avoid the gasoline tax.)

For a third, giant wind turbines are the wave of the future. And with global warming, we'll have plenty of wind!!