The dismal truth, Mr Rudd

Step 3: start conserving what we have left.

Rationing fuel, preferably by tradeable quotas, will be one of the first steps required to deal with the coming shortages. If this isn’t done, there will be mayhem - hoarding of supplies, black market profiteering, queues for fuel at petrol stations and crucially, shortages for essential services, particularly food production and distribution.

Support the proposed “Oil Depletion Protocol”, where all countries reduce their consumption progressively to match the available supply, this would mitigate the problem in the most equitable way possible, hopefully preventing a breakdown of world order.

Step 4: get our “best and brightest” researching and developing long term solutions.

The size of the challenge that confronts us is truly staggering. I fully support your “Education Revolution” and regard the deliberate neglect of public education by the Howard government as reprehensible. However, there is no point training more economists and bankers for the capitalist system which will not exist for much longer.

A new economic system

The fundamental problem behind all the problems we face is that we are reaching practical limits to growth, but our economic system will fail without economic growth.

We need an entirely new economic system which must be able to:

• function effectively without economic growth;
• function to equitably share resources in a world of declining resources;
• enable the development of local communities that are largely self sufficient;
• facilitate depopulation of the planet; and
• restore planetary ecosystems.

Such an economy may need to be a state-run economy, which tend to have poor track records. We need to learn from the mistakes of former state-run economies and come up with something that works.

A new energy system

We must face reality and understand that we are dependant on large amounts of energy just to meet the fundamental needs of a population that lives in cities and this cannot be changed in years or decades; it will take lifetimes. We must also understand that while there is energy available, we humans will use it because availability of energy equates to our standard of living.

A recent EWG report reveals that coal production will peak worldwide within 20 to 30 years. It will be simply impossible to provide our minimum energy needs once the oil, gas and coal are severely depleted.

Current technology nuclear power (based on the fission of Uranium235) is only able to provide a relatively small part of our energy needs because viable supplies of Uranium235 are very limited. Developing this technology for Australia would be very short sighted indeed.