Raise the Hammer

Ryan:

1-I think you need to read my whole post before responding; I am defiantly a proponent of doing things now, I just don't think that inaction will cost us anything save billions of dollars of debt and a few shaky years (Not good things by any definition, but also not 'society crumbles and small communities have to defend themselves from resource raiders')

2- We can easily use Thorium for nuclear power (Linked in that article); when we run out of thorium we can backpedal all our atomic waste into breeder reactors. Then we can use the newly created uranium and thorium again, we can continue this until either we run out of non-radioactive limiters, or we actually convert all of the available fissionable matter into pure energy (By which point our sun will likely be dying)

3- You can convert basically any bio-matter into bio-diesel and the whole host of plastics that we use today; it's just not always a positive energy curve on doing so (the process itself is rathe energy intensive); when we run out of fossil fuels- we won't really care that it's a net energy loss, we'll just make up for it with more atomic/wind/solar reactors/power plants.

4- Related to 3; any plastics used in the manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines, tidal generators can be produced even in lieu of there being fossil fuels; and the energy for manufacturing this equipment can be provided by existing atomic energy (in a crunch situation power could be regulated to more energy production first)

Now once again; I am not an advocate of doing nothing until we actually run out, I think it would be a very bad idea. I think that if we do nothing it will have a horrific decade or so of near-perpetual rolling blackouts and it will drive the countries involved into a stupid amount of debt. I do not think it will mean the end of society and a massive step backwards in technological development