brucie's link has me thinking and for once I want to be relatively humble and sincere in reply. I simply don't think things are as dire as this guy predicts and I know several of his points are wrong. Here's what I mean.

1. While in the short run there's no substitute for oil in many appications, rising prices would encourage development of longer term alternatives and, more importantly encourage conservation. We're a spendthrift nation when it comes to energy. During the oil crisis that spanned much of the 70s, we sharply reduced our dependence on oil. There's more that could have been done and we've forgotten most of the lessons we learned then. We'll cut back when we have no other choice and, despite an intitial shock to the economy, probably learn to thrive inspite of it.

2. The author dismisses all the possible alternative out of hand. In the short term, that's true, but he misses a number of reasonable substitutions. For instance he says that coal isn't a substitute for use in transportation and that hydrogen isn't a substitute because we currently generate it from natural gas. It's prefectly possible to generate hydrogen from coal. Build a coal powered electrical plant and hydrolize water. It may not be cheap, but it's possible and economic at the right energy prices. The author says several other things that make sense in isolation, but not in the larger world. Fertilizer currently comes from natural gas. You could fix nitrogen from the atmosphere (more coal powered plants), a more expensive solution, but a real one. Likewise while pesticide come from petroleum products, there are alternatives. Ask any organic farmer. Then (don't hate me) there's always genetic modification to make plants fix their own nitrogen and make their on natural defenses. Ugly, but it beats starving.

3. I hate to say it, but if we get hungry enough, nuclear power's limitations will seem less important. Maybe we'll get lucky and "sono-fusion" will really work. For all it's potential problems, it would be a dramatic improvement over fission reactors.

I'd also argue that neither party has anything like adequate answers to this problem. Oh, and not all bacteria eat each other. :D