One thing that may offset this somewhat but not completely: the increased use of telecommuting.

This is a good point. We need a re-organization of most things that require transport. My negativity is mostly from lack of recognition of a quickly approaching global crisis. The longer we ignore it the worse it will be.

Mankind has lived with war, famine and disease as constant facts of life for thousands of years. Any study of history before the Age of Fossil Fuels will show this quite clearly. That many now live in situations which are isolated from these facts is a consequence of the rapid use of the stored energy capital in FFs and those of us who live this way have all come to expect this to be normal.

The trouble is, all those high energy lifestyles are not normal. Once the party is over, well, it will be back to business as usual, unless, by way of some yet unknown discovery, another source of energy can be found to keep the game going. While I doubt that the high energy lifestyles can continue, as an engineer I do know of ways to produce useful energy at lower concentrations. The other problem is that we should have started a worldwide effort to make use of these sources after the first OPEC Embargo and the Iranian Crisis. Instead, we let the greedy idiots have their way and people like Ronnie RayGun kept feeding the illusion of Eternal Oil and the party kept rocking. Maybe this time, the party really is over but we won’t know until after the crowds have gone home and we wakeup with a permanent hangover…

It is better to dig the well when you are not thirsty