The problem is that what you say as a joke, other writers and commenters on TheOilDrum say entirely seriously. So it's a bit hard to tell. You have to be very clear.

Lovelock shares company only with other uninformed people. Informed people are much more moderate in what they say. Of informed people, Hansen's about the most extreme. But even he I think we can look at through the filter of, we'd all be doomers if we'd been talking about these things since the mid-80s and had begun by talking to that bunch of corrupt clowns in the US Congress.

Equally we must discount those obviously in the pockets of Enron etc.

So when we exclude the hysterical doomers and the corrupt cornucopians, we're left with a more sane middle ground. In there we start to look at things in insurance terms. There are high and low probability things, and high and low cost of mitigation things.

Obviously the things which are high probability, we must pay the cost to mitigate them no matter what - eg oil running short in the next decades. The things which are low probability but would cost a lot to mitigate we shouldn't worry about - eg nuclear war.

The things which aren't likely to happen but which don't cost much to mitigate are the "maybe" category. An Argentine-style economic collapse in Australia is very unlikely. We've an entirely different kind of economy. And you obviously think an Argentine-style economic collapse is unlikely, too, since you decided to keep a high-paying job - the Argentines lost all their savings in their economic collapse. If you really thought you were going to lose all your money then you wouldn't work so hard to get lots of it, would you?

So here you'd only do the things to make it not so bad if they're good things to do anyway. That's why I said I'd choose a stable secure moderate-paying job over an insecure high-paying one - that's always good. It's only if the only alternative to the high-paying insecure job is a low-paying secure one that there's any doubt, you start looking at how much money you could save, etc.

The best solutions to problems are where one solution solves several problems. This is the theory behind the old "teach a man to fish instead of giving him a fish." It's also what some greenish types call "the Theory of Anyway." It's the answer to the climate change or peak oil denialists - the things we do to mitigate the dangers of those things, they're good things to do anyway. Things like consuming less, avoiding debt, walking or biking instead of driving, eating less meat, planting trees - even if the Earth has a creamy nougat center of oil and burning coal gives us vitamin C, these are all good things to do anyway, things which improve our quality of life.

Something worth watching is SBS on Sunday night at 2030, Changing Climate, Changing Times.

To be honest, I think that the most likely scenario for the world, if we just let things drift, is a sort of ecotopia for a wealthy few in the world - probably in western Europe and eastern Asia, and the northeast and west of North America, with a few other outposts elsewhere - but with the nasty undercurrent of exploiting labour from the poorer parts of the world.

Something like what we see in India and many other developing nations - an effectively gated community of well-off people surrounded by slums and desperation. Only with an "ecological" turn to it.

I think this is most likely because the two key parts of an economy are resources and labour. In most countries, one of labour and resources are cheap, and the other expensive. When resources are cheap and labour expensive, we get machines doing nasty work, and humans can live cleaner lives.

No flying cars, but still pretty nice

But when resources are expensive and labour cheap, we get... well...

Shipbreaking supplies 80% of Bangladesh's steel

My fear is that we'll choose to have the second enable the first. Our steel will come from the sweat of their hands. It doesn't have to be that way, but with cheap labour and expensive resources, combined with our own selfish laziness, it's a likely way.

I think it's a nightmarish scenario, to be honest. I don't see how a society can be resource renewable without being socially renewable. Already we in the West live on the backs of the Third World to a large degree. Resource scarcity could make this worse. I don't want to live my life on the backs of other people, nor have others live on my back.

But it seems most likely to me. That's why I do what I can to suggest another way of living, one we can all have. I don't fear Mad Max. I fear Ecotopia.