.Why should we go into outer space? For the fun of it!

But, who's going to do all the work?

What work?

Do you see any signs of miracle births? — Bitter Crank

Unfortunately no but I'm an optimist and the future is so full of possibilities.

Also, I wouldn't count on a lack of oil bringing an end to war. People did just fine fighting wars before the first bucket of oil was poured into a barrel. — Bitter Crank

At least war won't be that destructive and also without petroleum-politics there'll be less reasons to go to war in the first place.

There's also natural gas as mentioned — Question

Sorry, natural gas passed it's peak of production too.

This is true: without oil (and all the technology that depends on cheap oil) there will be less reason -- and ability -- to go to war on a big scale, like WWII. But there will be plenty of fighting over the last few billion barrels of oil, rest assured.

I'm obviously joking, but I certainly don't want to be the first on Mars. — Question

You may not want to be the first person on Mars, but somebody has to go there to investigate geothermal energy on the Red Planet. You have an interest in that. It will be a lonely dirty job, but somebody has to do it.

I believe shale methane hasn't reached peak yet. And last I recall there is something like 200 years worth for the US to run off in the country alone. Also, shale oil/gas is a US innovation that hasn't yet taken hold of the rest of the world due to limiting the tech to the US to benefit initially from it the most last I recall.

Lastly, there's I think a thousand years worth of methane clathrate in the Mexican ocean and along the California coast laying on the seafloor. Once, prices are right you can expect that to be exploited soon enough.

The sad fact is that climate change is going to occur however you look at it due to dependence on hydrocarbons for fuel and the amount of money subsidizing it along with invested in it, plus the lobbying yada yada.

If someone reads about it, there's a bunch of methane being released in Siberia and the Artic along with unknown estimates from the Antartic. I suppose Greenland might have large deposits too, but I'm talking out of my ass about Greenland.

God save the Netherlands.

I agree -- global warming is in progress and it won't be put into reverse any time soon.

Global warming is thawing the permafrosted organic matter in the arctic areas of Canada and Eurasia. As it thaws, it rots producing methane. Whatever organic matter is under the ice in Antarctica won't be thawing in the near or intermediate future

believe shale methane hasn't reached peak yet. And last I recall there is something like 200 years worth for the US to run off in the country alone. Also, shale oil/gas is a US innovation that hasn't yet taken hold of the rest of the world due to limiting the tech to the US to benefit initially from it the most last I recall. — Question

All fossil fuel has to be extractible at an energy cost substantially less than the energy produced, or it is not worth doing by any measurement. After the end of the fairly short Age of Fossil Fuel there will be a lot of oil and gas still in the ground because it can only be extracted by putting more energy into the extraction than is gotten out of it. That doesn't make any kind of sense, and it won't be done.

The same goes for all other energy projects: The output has to substantially exceed the input. Hydrogen, for example, isn't freely available on earth. It has to be pried out of its preferred molecular forms. That takes substantial energy. Hydrogen, once obtained, is expensive to move, expensive to store, and is far more dangerous than methane. It's also corrosive (because it interacts with other elements) which is a problem for moving, storing, and using it.

As it thaws, it rots producing methane. — Bitter Crank

Did you notice the story a couple of years back on the mysterious Siberian craters? These are thought to be 'methane burps'. The earth bursts a pimple.

I view the human species as a bacterium whose population exploded exponentially after discovering a remarkable source of energy, a puddle of oil. This suddenly huge colony was for all intents and purpose made of the oil it gobbled down as quickly as possible.

This bacterium was "intelligent", and there was a general awareness that the puddle of oil it was gobbling was rapidly draining, and would soon be exhausted. This didn't matter though, for bacteria is bacteria, and the population continued gobbling uncontrollably, in a way that any individual bacterium was completely helpless to halt. If anything this "intelligence" made the problem worse, vast collective cleverness was put to the task of extracting and using this puddle as quickly as possible, and the colony was rapidly reorganized so that it was utterly dependent on its puddle to survive.

A certain complacency developed among many of the bacteria, and they told themselves "We'll think of something when the puddle runs out. We always have before." After all, the bacteria had done startlingly clever things since finding the puddle. What they didn't realize was that all their ingenuity was essentially finding new ways to use the puddle. Without it they couldn't really do that much. And that the puddle was their food, without it they had very little to eat.

Unsurprisingly, things went badly.

Your fable is quite precisely Kunstler's point in The Long Emergency. Our efforts to adapt to the depletion of our oil puddle will be frustrated by the fact that most of our 20th and 21st century technology is predicated on cheap plentiful oil. Without cheap plentiful oil, it will be very difficult for us to do what we might want to do.

For instance, world-wide nuclear generating plants can not be fabricated, transported, and built without oil. Neither can world-wide solar and wind technology. Life as we know it doesn't work without cheap oil and gas.

There will be a Big Die OFF (BDO). The BDO will leave survivors who will have to be very clever to find ways to operate using low and lower-tech methods. They who can grow potatoes will live better than they who know not how a potato grows. They who have an old wood stove, a big tree, and an axe to grind will survive winter better than they living in the all-electric high rise.

As your fable concluded,

Unsurprisingly, things went badly. — hypericin

Well, isn't that just the way life is? Grow some culture on a petri dish and it will flourish, until it uses up all the nutrients, then it will die off. Death is not absolute though, some stragglers will persist, living off of God knows what, the spores will go into long term suspended animation, and other species will move in to live off the dead. Evolution waves its magic wand.

What does Australia makes its living from? Coal and minerals. Who owns the media. Coal billionaires like Gina Rhineheart. Who owns the politicians? The same. — apokrisis

The Turnbull government has overruled an independent selection panel to appoint the chair of the Minerals Council to the Australian Broadcasting Commission board.

Communications Minister Mitch Fifield said Vanessa Guthrie has the "requisite skills" to be on the board, despite not making the final list of recommendations put forward by the Nomination Panel for ABC and SBS Board Appointments.

The five-year appointment comes amid heated political debate about the role of fossil fuels and renewable energy in Australia, and follows government criticism of the public broadcaster's coverage of coal mining and energy security.

The Perth-based Dr Guthrie has more than 30 years of experience in the mining and resources industries, holding a variety of senior executive roles at Alcoa, Woodside Energy and Goldfields Limited.

You said it!

This is true: without oil (and all the technology that depends on cheap oil) there will be less reason -- and ability -- to go to war on a big scale, like WWII. But there will be plenty of fighting over the last few billion barrels of oil, rest assured. — Bitter Crank

The unfortunate problem here is that oil extraction and consumption is primarily required for military use and domination of sources and production is essentially an economic and strategic commodity, hence why I have zero optimism. It is clear that the situation in the Middle East and the dynamics of regional politics - United States vs. Russia and China - really amount to the rivalry for oil as a military asset since provisions would enable both the economic advantage but also machine power. China realised the importance of this while observing the Gulf War and as their military strength and space technology increases, so does the need for oil; renewable energy is a technology the military has no time for.

In addition, methods of oil extraction is having too great an impact on the environment that I hardly think we have the time to really wait for renewable energy to be implemented. Deforestation and construction of technology to extract oil along with the toxic chemicals and emissions polluting the air and water that it is clearly damaging the environment and wildlife - as well as people - that the ecosphere will not survive if we continue. This, capped with a whole lot of other issues reinforced by capitalism, the existential crises we face seems to be duly ignored by the rubbish of the entertainment industry.

renewable energy is a technology the military has no time for. — TimeLine

Right. I don't see the pentagon running big windmills and biomass plants to keep the aircraft carriers going.

Kunstler (among others) is very pessimistic-to-downright dismissive of renewable and alternate energy schemes. He doesn't claim that solar panels or windmills don't work, of course. They do. But they are dependent on affordable and readily available oil for their manufacture, transportation, and installation--as is so much else.

Synthetic oil can be manufactured from coal; biomass will produce gas and oil. What they won't and can't do is produce petroleum replacement in the quantity that 7 billion people require, and there isn't enough coal and biomes.

So what will we all be doing in the future?

What we will all be doing is trying to grow food. Farming is our future because without oil (tractors, combines, all the heavy duty equipment) we'll all be out hoeing what crops we can grow on whatever land we can find. What happened to all the land? It will still be there -- just that most people don't live on the land anymore. Most people live in cities, and it will take time to redistribute remaining populations.

Remaining populations? There will, of necessity be a "population decline" shall we say? A big die off. Oil gave us the carrying capacity for 7 billion. No oil, no 7 billion.

Yes. There's plenty of plastic in landfills. Plenty of coal to fuel the production of nuclear power plants.

Don't forget oil is the basis of plastics also. It is indispensable for an enormous range of products and industrial ingredients aside from its obvious use as fuel.

Australia would be well-placed to utilize nuclear energy, as we have abundant plutonium and a very large stable landmass with little siesmic activity. However aside from political opposition, which would be hysterical and practically universal, the lead time in gaining expertise and actually building a plant would be more than 20 years and possibly as long as 40.

So what will we all be doing in the future?

What we will all be doing is trying to grow food. Farming is our future because without oil (tractors, combines, all the heavy duty equipment) we'll all be out hoeing what crops we can grow on whatever land we can find. What happened to all the land? It will still be there -- just that most people don't live on the land anymore. Most people live in cities, and it will take time to redistribute remaining populations.

Remaining populations? There will, of necessity be a "population decline" shall we say? A big die off. Oil gave us the carrying capacity for 7 billion. No oil, no 7 billion. — Bitter Crank

As I said, oil is far more than mere economics, it is international politics and the source of political power. Add capitalism to the algorithm; McDonalds needs beef, skip the supply-chain process and you have deforestation to agriculture cows that produce more greenhouse emissions than cars. You have multinational corporations, skip the absence of environmental management and international restrictions, you have massive environmental degradation in the Niger Delta or Texaco killing people, animals, the environment in Ecuador. Nuclear power and radioactive waste that gets buried for...ever? Nuclear bombs in the pacific?

Can a human body survive with fats, without water? Drain them, you kill the person. Earth, the ecosystem works like a living organism and there is only so much it will take.

Are you sure we even have a future?

Huge amounts of stuff to be hauled--for one. Concrete and steel are made with fossil fuel--huge amounts of heat needed to make portland cement and steel. Construction equipment all runs on oil. All of the vital pumps in a nuclear power plant (or any other kind of plant for that matter) require heavy duty lubrication. Things like that.

as we have abundant plutonium — Wayfarer

And just how did you get all that plutonium, and what is Australia planning to do with it? Or maybe you have abundant uranium?

Construction does run on oil. Why not coal?

Coal/steam equipment could be made again, but it hasn't been made in around 60-70 years. We'd have to research, retool and rediscover techniques for it's optimal operation. The last steam train I saw actually working was in the early 1950s. Also, coal is pretty dirty (global warming) and there isn't an infinite supply of high quality coal, either.

The US is sitting on a couple centuries worth of coal. I'm just saying... I think the BDO is baloney. It may happen, but not because of oil depletion.

Are you sure we even have a future? — TimeLine

I hope we have some sort of future, but... No, not sure.

Just as oil is not all equal, coal isn't all equal either. Some coal deposits are better quality than others. Some coal deposits are easier to get at than other deposits. Even if it was all good, would that be 200 years of using coal for synfuels, steam power, electrical generation, et al? Probably not, and don't forget yet another horseman of the apocalypse--global warming.

Plus, tearing up land to get at coal, and extracting and processing coal is very dirty; it produces a lot of very bad crap.

The BDO is speculative, for sure. But at some point, insufficient agricultural production will result in population reduction. It can't help but reduce the population.

Kunstler goes off the deep end, I think, in his predictions about disease and horrific global pandemics. Unless some mad scientist/evil political cabal decided to bring back small pox, or engineered a really devastating influenza virus (worse than the 1918 version), I don't see a disease-related MDO.

But starvation is still a real and present danger, not tomorrow or next week -- but we have had crop failures on a national scale in the recent past -- fortunately compensated by good crops elsewhere (like in Australia and Argentina when the USA or Russian wheat fields did poorly). Insects, unseasonable rain, drought, hot weather, late or early frost, wheat rust, corn smut, etc. are all potential threats to a particular harvest.

Water is, indeed, a highly problematic element in our future.

Right. Change is coming. We don't usually change intelligently. We barrel into catastrophe and then change.