Back in the mid 1970’s there was a group called “the Club of Rome” who wrote some papers that showed how exponential growth would cause the depletion of natural resources by about the year 2020 and probably by 2050, even if growth slowed. Where are we now?

Those predictions are not too far off the mark now. Even the advocates for oil exploration and exploitation agree that the next “crunch” for oil is coming in around 2012 – 4 years away. This is when the world will realise that there is no more oil to be found and that you cannot just put pressure on the Middle Eastern states to allow more oil to be sold.

We know this and yet, it seems, people are not willing to do anything meaningful about it. The politicians here in Australia managed to STOP a moderately sized wind farm in Gippsland a few years back on the pretext that the wind turbines would kill endangered parrots. The environmental study suggested that one of these parrots would be hit by a turbine every few thousand years.

The (then) Federal Environment Minister overrode the Victorian Government to stop the wind farm from being developed. You might ask why they would do this… Clive Hamilton, in his book Scorcher presents compelling evidence to show how the Australian Coal industry associations successfully lobbied the Federal Government to support it over “alternative” energy sources. The donation records to political parties are instructive, indeed! The Government was totally opposed to the idea that there was any evidence of Global Warming or climate change. They even maintained this when the evidence was there in everyone’s face. I recall that Goebbels once said “if you are going to tell a lie them best make it a big one”. The also said “If you say something often enough and with enough conviction then eventually people will believe you”.

If you dont like being compared to Nazis, then maybe stop resembling them!

The consequences of ignoring the evidence in front of our eyes could be the same as for the people of Easter Island, Greenland and the citizens of Ankor Wat. Ignore environmental problems and face the consequences. In these cases, annihilation of your civilisation.

What are the LIKELY consequences of the combined oil crunch and climate change? Here are some:

• Lessening food production and higher costs
• Changing economic power and many more resource-based fights or wars
• Water shortages in the mid latitudes – like the USA, Australia, North and South Africa and Argentina, Chile etc.
• Potential collapse of large industrial states (but more like the way Britain dropped from being a world power pre WW I to its state in post WW II).
• A sudden realisation that current transport models are not sustainable and massive reduction in car numbers
• High consumption lifestyles will be very costly. New poverty traps will evolve for people in low quality, energy wasting suburban areas popular in the 1960’s to 1990’s.
• Population decline either due to economic or disease causes – hopefully not like the Plague of the 14-17 th centuries.

Something nice to think about.