It seems like when we sit down and think about what the obstacles are to the measures John suggests that it is pretty clear that they won't happen any time soon. Rationing is not something we could get legislators to even think about.

I notice that Jared Diamond will be speaking in April at an event that seems to be open to the public:

Diamond, Browner featured speakers for energy conference

Renowned scholar and Pulitzer prize-winning author Jared Diamond will deliver the keynote address at the third "Energizing Kentucky Conference," scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, April 15 and 16, at the Lexington Hyatt Regency. The conference is to focus on the role of education in energy production, distribution and conservation.

I expect the local political leadership to react to peak oil as they are reacting to global warming, with an honest and serious effort guided by reasonable scientific facts and extrapolations made by experts. The effort for limiting global warming would have a reasonable chase to limit the climate change if we in Sweden were more then about 1/1000 of the world population. I am sure that we will react in a sane way during the post peak oil era since resource limitations and the peak oil issue already is number two on the problem list due to obvious market changes and people and politicians listening to Kjell Aleklett among others.

These interconnected problems has lead to very large changes in the energy policies. For instance has one of the original anti nuclear parties recently accepted the need for building new reactors to replace the old ones to avoid a risk for electricity shortages in the 2020:s and 2030:s. We have one of the largest car and truck industries per capita in the world and it is still generally accepted that we need to invest more in the complementing electrified rail network to keep long term transportation costs under control. And most people do accept high CO2 taxes.

This does not mean that everything is perfect or going fast forward but most of the serious problems are being worked on by politicians or the market forces, eg individuals.

The financial crisis is making things uncertain but so far t is far from a collapse over here. Investments have not stopped and new things are being done.

This gives me the impression that we can have a rich "bio-nuclear" future, we only have to work hard during a few transition decades. But this do of course only work out well if you actually do something. LEARN is one example but I do not agree that it is that hopelss or that we wont have any energy. Water will flow downhill for a long time, the sun will shine and nuclear physics wont change while we can do what we already did in the 1960:s in a better way.

Re: Jared Diamond's 49%

That number sounds suspicious to me. My guess is that he actually thinks it's greater than 50% but doesn't want to deal with the (negative) response he would get if he stuck his neck out that far.

This isn't a criticism...it does take courage to say something that is in direct opposition to the prevailing (if in the background) societal conversation, which at this point in time is something like "humanity will always progress" or to distinguish a conversation more in the foreground "when the economy picks up in x years."

It's a small number of people who get that the economy will never pick up, in my view.

While the resistance of individuals to change is very important, it is a different topic than the resistance of social groups to change.

Regarding Nate's excellent "I Don't Know" post, just taking a straightforward reading, Nate looked mostly at the phenomenon of resistance to change in individuals, and many of his points in fact relate to individuals within specific scientific disciplines. The "Planck problem" and the quotation from historian of science I. B. Cohen illustrates the phenomenon of resistance to change in a scientific discipline. But scientific disciplines are very peculiar social groupings. The training to be a "citizen" in (say) the U. S. A. is very nebulous and much less disciplined. E. g. the Bush administration for example is widely regarded as having acted in blatant contradiction to the Constitution, probably correctly, yet this has not really created much of a scandal. So much for standards.

But secondly, societies behave very differently from individuals. The situation is much more fluid. Societies can and do change rapidly. It's called a "political revolution." People have studied the French Revolution for several centuries and still haven't figured it out. The problem of individuals resisting change, and societies resisting change, are very different. There is not a lot of understanding of how these things happen, but they do. I think the correct response is "I don't know how or if it will happen," not "I know that it won't happen." In a political revolution, you need precisely a political collapse for things to move forward. The day after a political and financial collapse, we would still have largely the same people, same resources, and same knowledge that we had the day before. This is a necessary condition of progress.