I am a hardcore Doomer who believes in the fast-crash, but I hope I am wrong, and we can get a slow decline.  What worries me most about Peakoil is the effect it will have upon our food and water.  People can quickly scale up to pedaling a bicycle twenty or thirty miles a day if they really have go that distance to support their families, but the real future trick will be having sufficient food and water.  I don't think there is any solution.

If I was a farmer who knew about Peakoil and I had no mortgage on my land-- I would be drastically changing my methods and crops so that I could be self-sustainable as possible.  For example, if I owned 5,000 acres that would be normally a corn crop, I probably would immediately change 2000 acres over to be woodland and natural habitat so that I would have a future source of firewood, nut trees, berry plants, and wildlife to hunt.  Probably another 2000 acres so I could pasture just a few oxen, horses, dairy cattle, pigs, sheep, etc, and a large family garden.  Then maybe the last 1000 acres to growing commercial corn or soybeans, but shrinking this amount every year, so that I could grow cotton exclusively for myself.

Now if every farmer starts doing this, pretty damn quickly you have major food shortages in the cities and towns.  Why would the farmers do this?  As oil prices escalate upwards, the farmer won't be able to afford the energy to grow the usual 5,000 acres anyhow, so he might just as well put his efforts into his own survival using his labor and permiculture techniques.  Too bad for the rest of us.

Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ  Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?