This makes it important to keep electricity production up and price down to keep non oil sectors healthy and people warm and comfortable and to have towns functioning on bicycling and collective transportation and those systems are fairly ok.

The biggest external psycological help with this would probably be if some rich country region crashed and media were full of reports on how awfull it is in the car-only parts of the world who have lacked planning and now cant afford new infrastructure. Be patriotic and accept the lower pension etc, in a few years the new trolley and rail lines will open and plug-in hybrids are slowly getting cheaper, it will be better in 5 years. And if you can afford it, buy a share in the new nuclear powerplants and be guaranteed a maximum price for you kWh!

I think it is time to dust of the old nation state and try to keep the competition on the constructive side, who is better at creating new resources and make savings? Those who are best at it should both compete and trade and thus also get resources to help or keep the riff-raff at bay depending on how desperate people are and how cynical people outside this club are. If war starts resources will contract fast and they will be burned in non constructive competition.

Studies of human happiness have famously shown that once basic needs are met, material wealth doesn't make any real difference to happiness. What does make a difference to happiness is relative status. If you're doing better than the other guy, you feel good. You'll get the girls.

I used to think that this was a terrible thing, because we can never make everyone happy - someone will always be at the bottom of the heap, someone always comes last even in the olympics. Now I see the glass half full - when we power down in may not actually make much difference to human happiness, ie social stability as long as we make sure that the basic needs are met. We can consume a hell of a lot less resources than we (in the developed world) do now and still meet those basic needs.

I think we have a chance if the decline is in fact Stuart's "slow squeeze" and the realisation and transition is slow enough not to induce a panic.

Human society is unable, due to psychological hard wiring, to go from a state of high energy use to a lower one without some serious strife and struggle that is typically expressed violently.

But:

I think it is possible and in the end inevitable that humans will eventually evolve an intelligent way into sustainable consciousness.

I think there's somewhere in the middle that's probably right. I haven't missed the point. I would rephrase your point as "It will be extremely difficult, if possible at all, for people in the rich world to adjust to lower amounts of energy without great violence. It goes against millions of years of genetic selection and thousands of years of recent experience." I certainly agree with that.

I don't agree with the original statement from maximumheaviosity, quoting and paraphrasing Hanson:

Jay's conclusion is validated: "No combination of renewable energy systems have the potential to generate more than a fraction of the power now being generated by fossil fuels." Result: Die-off.

The proposition is that no combination of renewable energy systems have the potential to replace current fossil fuel energy. The unstated assumption is that we need enough energy to replace all current fossil fuel energy. I don't agree with that assumption. I don't disagree that there will be a population reduction, I do agree that there will be increasing violence, and I do expect some amount of premature human deaths in the process (witness Iraq and Lebanon now), but IMHO we can make due with much less energy, so that the adjustment doesn't have to be through massive violence.

There is no newness... there is adaptation to do the same-old-thing. Isn't this prison cleverness similar to meeting our energy constraints with hybrid cars and ethanol?

At this point we still haven't peaked for sure.  We might still keep increasing a bit more.  And maybe the post peak decline will be gradual enough for us to make changes.  Maybe it won't be and we'll have severe societal collapse and then something new will rise from the ashes.  I'll hope for the former only because there is no guarantee that you or I, will be amongst those rising from the ashes, or rather will just be the ashes.  

But with enough time and effort we could create more power using alternative means than we currently use.  The effort in  switching over would be large and would in itself consume a lot of resources, but the absolute limit of energy available to us is not one we are anywhere near bumping into right now.

I do think that capitalistic economics has in some strange way captured the expense of over population in that nearly all developed countries are showing signs of declining populations.  Overall I am not a huge fan of capitalism as I feel it has many flaws (which require augmentation by other means), but in some ways it seems pretty impressive how fluid and adaptible the system really is.  

"Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy. . . . It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries. Fitche laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished."

"Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible."

"Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton."
~Bertrand Russell, "The Impact of Science on Society", 1953, pg 49-50

"In like manner, the scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities, probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play.... All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called 'co-operative,' i.e., to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them."

"Except for the one matter of loyalty to the World State and to their own order, members of the governing class will be encouraged to be adventurous and full of initiative...."

"On those rare occasions, when a boy or girl who has passed the age at which it is usual to determine social status shows such marked ability as to seem the intellectual equal of the rulers, a difficult situation will arise, requiring serious consideration. If the youth is content to abandon his previous associates and to throw in his lot whole-heartedly with the rulers, he may, after suitable tests, be promoted, but if he shows any regrettable solidarity with his previous associates, the rulers will reluctantly conclude that there is nothing to be done with him except to send him to the lethal chamber before his ill-disciplined intelligence has had time to spread revolt. This will be a painful duty to the rulers, but I think they will not shrink from performing it."
~Bertrand Russell, "The Scientific Outlook", 1931

Coming at it from that perspective, it made me think that peak oil (and our lazy resposne to it) is just like all the big scary things we've faced before.  I really saw nothing in peak oil to make it the "special" problem that would sneak under our evolutionary preparation and get us.  So no, I don't agree with:

Of course "Humans are extremely adaptable" and have not "died out hundreds of thousands of years ago".
But THIS is the problem, humans are extremely adaptable to the range of difficult situations they HAVE MET for "hundreds of thousands of years".
This is not the kind of problems we are facing now.

I think a steep depletion curve will be a challenge, no doubt.

But I think that anyone who knows the outcome has gone religious on this one.

There are huge problems in trying to objectively judge the motivations of humans in general, and trying to predict the future, esp. future human behaviour. And to relate it to the original article:

"He particularly interested in working out a 'logic' framework on the human behavioral aspects of everyday life, and believes we can parse much of our behaviour into a simple set of 'if-then' analog algorithms, evolutionarily designed, context dependent."

Dieoff guy is a classical megalomaniac in my opinion, as are many of the commentators on this board. Just listen to statements like these: "I studied modern economic theory on the assumption that our political leaders would work to change the flaws once I was able to point them out. I became aware that something was fundamentally wrong in our political system when I ran for public office." Notice: he had the flaws worked out before he took the education. Afterwards, he's suprised that people won't listen to him or vote for him! Yet we are supposed to believe this is a man with profound insights about society and human nature?

Misunderstood genius syndrome all over...

"No scientific predictor - whether a human scientist or a calculating machine - can possibly predict, by scientific methods, its own future results" -- Karl Popper.

Popper's "The poverty of historicism" and "The Open Society and its enemies" should be mandatory readings to all would-be prophets.

the government would step in and mandate that all our resources go into developing the new energy resources.

The only fix I can see is to tax the bad stuff but not the renewable stuff and let people sort out what works; people will invest money in things which aren't taxed (look at tax shelters).  We have to do this soon, or we won't have the margins to make it move fast enough.

Discussions went beyond that to include "even if we get past the immediate fossil fuel energy problems we still have a good chance of killing ourselves off with climate change, resource degredation of water, soil, and air along with the wars that will accompany those issues. Coal won't last long either."

To me the issue was 9 to 10 billion people drawing down all planetary resources, not just fossil fuel depleation.

Detroit knew how to make very high MPG cars in the 1970's.  Detroit could not have built them if the knowledge was lacking, but the failure to build them given the knowledge was due more to a lack of incentive.  The US had the knowledge to develop better nuclear power plants years ago, but again the incentive was lacking (a great many people willed them not to be built - which some of them now regret).

The natives of Easter Island stripped it of trees because they probably didn't know any better.  We have options they did not; we know better, but the knowledge does nothing without the will to use it.

Prove Jay's theories wrong Big Guy. Really, I am personally calling you out to prove him wrong. =) I want you to:

A. State your income (a proxy for the economic activity you are engaged in. (economic activity = energy consumption)

B. Voluntarily take a 75% paycut

C. Report back after 2 months or so to this forum and others.

Regarding Jay's last message, here are some relevant quotes for you:

"the truth will set you free but it will make you sick"
(unknown)

"the problem with knowing the truth is sometimes you find it." (me)

"he who brings great knowledge also brings great sorrow" (somewhere in the Bible)