Here's the piece, followed by a link to the original:- Ditch the car, we're running out of oil Thursday, 2 June 2005 Next time you fill up your petrol tank, enjoy it, it won't be around forever. Tim Winton is a permaculture expert speaking on the Gold Coast this weekend. He says it’s time for us to get ready for a world with less oil. “‘Peak oil’ is the time when oil production starts to decline. All resource recoveries go through a bell-shaped curve where first we find the good easy stuff, production increases, eventually production peaks out and then it starts to decline. Anyone who has ever picked fruit will know all about that. It’s just a natural progression that all systems go through�, Tim says. “Some retired oil geologists are predicting ‘peak oil’ has either happened or will happen in the next five years. Some of the government bodies are predicting that it might be as far as twenty years out. It looks like more and more that the peak oil production is very close at hand�. If you think that is the only bad news, think again. Tim says energy and the economy are directly linked, “you only have to go back to the 1970s and the oil shocks there to see what happened to the economy. There was high inflation, high interest rates, less jobs, people found it more difficult to pay the bills. If we’re not careful, when ‘peak oil’ arrives these same things will happen, but it will be terminal, there will be no cycling out of it again when oil supplies come back online�. That’s the bad news. What’s the good news? “There are plenty of positive alternatives. Everyone could live on a fifth of the energy budget they have now. It would mean a change in lifestyle, in the way they do things, and this is a much more difficult challenge than the technical challenges ahead of us�, Tim explains, “I don’t think we’re going back to the days of the horse and cart but I think we will have more localised economies. Really well designed, urban areas are great. There are a lot of solutions, I’ll mention permaculture, it’s custom-designed for living well with less. It was developed during the oil shocks of the seventies, it’s about using design to maximise your energy resources,� Tim Winton. http://www.abc.net.au/goldcoast/stories/s1382277.htm