It's our Economy, stupid.

As a species we face many challenges, and in the long run I'm pessimistic for our comfy technological society, but things don't have to descend into a new dark age because the crude runs low.

This is neither an endorsement nor a review; I haven't read any more to do with this book than there is in the CBC article I linked to, but it does address some things that I've talked about before.

Things like bio-fuels (ethanol in particular) are losing their glow, and the whole warming thing is neither proven nor necessarily inconvenient to all (I live in the northern part of the Northern Temperate Zone with a lot of other people), but there are some things that face us that are not so debatable.

Overpopulation is with us already, but I believe that Nature will correct that even if we don't. Hand in glove with that however is resource scarcity. Really, without some sort of scarcity it's not overpopulation, just a lot of somebodies, but you get the point.

The key to any wealthy advanced society is energy. With sufficiently accessible and cheap energy we can do anything we need to do should we put our minds to it. I think that's one of the things these book guys are talking about.

"Electricity is the perfect energy carrier for an uncertain future because it's a carrier; it's not a source of energy," Perl said.

Hydro, tidal, geothermal, wind, ethanol and, yes, coal and nuclear all can feed into the grid during the transition, Perl and Gilbert write.

With the exception of ethanol (NOT efficient or cheap) I couldn't agree more. They don't mention natural gas, which we still have a lot of, and there is an interesting idea that it is created by non-organic geologic processes, but coal is abundant and we can scrub it well. Nuclear power is coming back, a trend which I predict will continue (with some hiccups) as the stakes become more obvious to the average person. Risk assessment is an ever-changing game as priorities shift, so maybe "Please, in my backyard!" will become more common...

One word: plastics. IT ALL COMES FROM OIL. It's not the first thing most people think of, but as Jerry Pournelle keeps saying (although I'd figured it out too), oil is too useful/precious to burn. Seems an odd way to look at it at first, but we can get energy other ways. However, synthetics of all types and a lot of lubricants are not so easy to come up with without oil.

Progress to me means that life gets BETTER, not that tracts of bland housing and strip malls take over all of our agricultural land (another issue...). I do not agree with taxing any necessity to discourage consumption, but here's an idea for a stick-and-carrot tax that might do the job.

1. Put a surtax on our income tax instead of a consumption tax.

2. Set up or better still encourage some companies that research the stuff that we need; more efficient solar power, supercapacitors/batteries, whatever.

3. Make investments in those companies tax-deductible.

The net effect is still a loss of income, but at least with some hope of a return. The tax lawyers might pick this apart, but it has to be better than just having more of our money sucked into the black hole of government via a "Carbon Tax".

So, we need sound ideas and action. Of course people are lazy as long as things are cheap, but that's changed with oil, so we have to change too. Adapt to survive; that's what humans are best at. We can do this the (relatively) easy way, 'tho there's always that economic collapse into a new dark age to fall back on...