My 14 year old daughter, and her best friend were lamenting about the news that Obama wants to make the school year longer. I told them that Obama wants them to be as educated as possible, to meet the challenges that are coming. "Like what?" they asked. "Like Climate Change and Peak Oil, for example.", I said.

They said that they thought that hydrogen was the solution. I said it might be, if we could figure out a way to produce it that in didn't itself require much energy. That's the trouble with all the alternative energy sources that we have developed so far. The return on the energy expended to create the energy, is much smaller than it has been with the easy to get at oil. Oil has been an amazing gift, in hindsight. Since it's such a finite resource (and one that causes pollution!), it's too bad that we've used up, and squandered so much of it. It's not that the Earth is running out of Oil; it's running out of the oil that takes the least amount of energy to get. Now, the deeper they drill, and the smaller the oil fields, the more energy it's going to take to get it out, and the more expensive it's going to be.

Grain prices tripled between 2006 - 2008. The more expensive Oil becomes, the more expensive, machine grown and distributed, food will become. I told them about what Pfeiffer had written in his article "Eating Fossil Fuels".

They were incredulous. "OMG! You mean, we are all going to die?!"

I said, "No, no. That's just the worse-case scenario. That would only happen if we continue as we have been, and don't change the way we do anything. We're not THAT stupid!"