Peak Oil And The Economy

A couple of interesting pieces:

Our Oil-Constrained Future, by Kevin Drum
and
Can we Grow the Economy any More, by Stuart Staniford.

Stuart's piece is following up on a previous post by Drum.  Stuart's piece gets into a number of interesting, but ultimately painful areas.  It goes toward the point I've felt, that our national standard-of-living (and the First World) differential versus the developing world is unsustainable, and will result in our standard-of-living decreasing relatively while the developing world's standard-of-living improves.  This assumes we don't hit a Malthusian-type limit to total growth, be that in resources, food supply, climate change or some other restraint.  Another possibility, well covered by Stuart and at Greed, Green and Grains, is civil unrest.  This decrease in standard-of-living, which I think is almost inevitable, will most likely bring instability here at home.  Likewise, food shortages will continue to bring unrest to the developing world.  We face a challenging future, and the time to begin to deal with it is now.