Mayo,

I read the Harper's article. I found it very interesting, especially if one looks at it from the perspective of a liberal survivalist viewpoint. Normally the left is so far removed from any of the apocalyptic prediction of the left behinders and whatever the other survivalists are scared about. It's a bit of this decades Ecotopia.

It makes me wonder about what sort of 19th century professions would make a comeback under such conditions and what sort of technology would be able to transition to a petro free economy. Despite the idyllic dreams of many anti-car BF attendees some sort of car will always endure. Cultures rarely abandon technology and we aren't going to give up our thousands of miles of road system anytime soon. Though I do think we could see a revival of local textiles manufacturing as it gets prohibitively expensive to ship items globally.

Everyone keeps talking about how this will affect cycling (it is a bikes forum) and autos, but I don't think folks really appreciate how this will devestate poorer countries that are already hanging by a thread. The Harpers article primarily focussed on how it will affect the middle class in the United States. But the biggest devestation will be upon our agricultural sector. All of our food relies on petro based fertilizers and cheap transportation to distribute things like chilean grapes half way around the world. So many plants can't grow without the fertilizers and pesticides that they've been engineered with. And even worse so many people around the world count on our excess agricultural capacity to keep from starving. What will happen when we can only grow enough for ourselves?

And this doesn't even touch on the coming wars for oil. One thing I think you will definitely see in the next century is a repopulating of all the middle american farming communities as local farming again becomes a viable enterprise. And maybe they might dig up some of those office parks that are sitting on prime agricultural land, the ones that come to mind are out in Redmond, WA. These are fields that lie in a floodplain and get tons of rain each year.

Anyways that's enough of a peak oil rant for now.