I’m still picking that, as long as the oil price remains low, we’ll see a much faster economic recovery than widely expected, though this could be impeded by stimuli packages that create jobs with negative productive value.

Taking the initiative and aggressively moving away from the present high carbon energy sources to proven lower or zero carbon energy sources addresses both problems.

The worst scenario is to rely on present energy sources and unproven possibles until it’s too late to develop proven alternatives with the result that, in a serious energy crunch, to keep the economy going and people fed we end up pushing coal use even higher.

I focus on energy because that’s the first to hit us and both how we tackle, and how effectively we tackle it will affect the other challenges we face.

With a cheap reliable carbon free energy supply; food production can be increased (which at least alleviates the population problem), sea water can be desalinised, CO2 emissions reduced, and nations tend to be less belligerent when their people are satisfied.

I posted this not because it was specifically about climate change, but because it illustrates one strand of thinking that goes way beyond what climate cranks like to call alarmism. You think energy’s the crunch — I think there’s a triple whammy in the wings: climate, energy and population.

But I agree entirely about the imperative of avoiding a collapse in the sense Orlov describes. I will enlarge the kitchen garden, though…

Mr Orlov is basically saying the same thing as I’ve been saying for the last 3 or 4 years, what I find worrying is that, like others singing this song, he seems to be almost embracing such a collapse, like Kunstler he imagines that after a bit of a rough time things will settle down so that everyone will be able to live in some sort of idilic back to the earth Good Life (remember the series starring Richard Briers?).

If we have a collapse it won’t be like that, throughout most of the world there will be mass starvation, far more poverty and conflict, diseases will run rampant, there will be little medical treatment, and life expectancy, even after things have stabilised, will be half what it is now.
International trade will collapse, and with it the factories that produce all those things we take for granted will close.
We need to avoid a collapse to keep the technological aspects of this civilisation intact, and the first principle we need to look at when aiming to do that is the precautionary principle, don’t rely on uncertain energy supplies but shoot straight for those that we know do work and return a high energy return on energy invested.