you wrote:

Wind and tidal energy are enormous opportunities as are solar and geothermal.

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the calculations of energy density (not to say utility) of all major alternative energy sources have already been done..and they come up short. Fossil-fuels have a unique energy density, orders of magnitude (yes, that much), higher than ANY other alternative.

Do the research. I had a website comparing the relative energy density of various energy sources available to us (I can't come up with it at the moment, but I'll see if I can find it and post it here), and fossil-fuel density is light-years ahead of everything else. Practically, anyway. We can't make up the difference even with intensive, efficient use of ALL alternatives..something that could take a half-century of development, at least.

The industrial/technological/population growth of the human species has been fueled by oil, and nothing else. Take away oil, we're all back to the bronze age. Our entire way of life in the US is a direct result of our profligate, irresponsible use of millions of years of ancient sunshine...we can't sustain that way of life, not even close, without fossil fuels. The math on the subject is dismally clear.

And now China and India want what we have. That will be literally impossible. There's not enough oil left for them to have what we have. There's not enough oil left for US to have what we have.

I am becoming less optimistic every day, as I contemplate the insanity around me. No one understands. No-one. By that I mean, a handful of people around the world, relatively speaking, gets this. But that's it.

Your post displays the human trait--probably genetically-based--that if we "run out" we'll "get more." Think about it. The entire human experiment is now balanced on that single paradigm: if we "run out" we'll "get more." What if we can't "get more?" What then?

That's about when I start wondering just how I, or anyone, will survive the next 20 or 30 years.

www.warsocialism.com

www.dieoff.org

(the dieoff site especially is full of well-sourced links and articles that show that alternative energy sources will not save us. It also contains several convincing essays suggesting that once the oil runs short, endless war for the last of it will be our collective fate.)

There are over 6 billion human beings on this planet. The most optimistic estimate of a *sustainable* population (that does not eat into its resource and environmental capital any more than we already have), is around a billion.

And that, my friends, is the real elephant in the room: what exactly will happen to the other 5 billion in the next 50 years? Because if world oil production begins declining at 10-20% yearly (a not unreasonable number, based on the declines at current large fields, Cantarell, and the North Sea fields being signal examples. And given that there are no major fields left to discover and exploit.) there will not be enough energy to support that 6-billion. In a cruel irony, the people on earth who have very simple rural lifestyles that might enable them to survive, are very likely the ones who will die first.

We here in the US will suffer plenty though, and will be lucky to escape nuclear war, frankly.

I don't want any of this to be true. But James Howard Kunstler puts it well on his website: we're all going to have to make "other arrangements." You decide what those might be..