I'm just gonna throw a few tidbits out there and see what y'all think...let's start with Dr. Albert Bartlett:
Here we've got a college physics lecturer from Boulder, CO, form a frontal assault on business as usual ('BAU') in the modern world, using only math. Watching made me a tad ill (it was late at nite). We're not talking fuzzy government statistics math here, we're talking plain old algebra. Hence the queasy. Warning: there are eight sections comprising 90 minutes or so, and couldn't help watching them one right after the other - not everyone's quite as interested in the intersection of energy and the economy as I am though, but I do ask you to start at episode 1 and continue at least through 3 (approx 30 mins) when he talks about coal. Coal is our most widely discussed panacea for our energy problems, Dr. Bartlett, I think, disagrees; decide for yourself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
Now I'm going to have to re-watch them so I can respond to your thoughts (please try to tag any references to the lecture with the episode# and time so we can skip to it) - Analysis is what the Futurist Institute is here for, and I can't really do that alone.
My first thought is where I think things play out a bit differently in the real world: in his emphasis on population, mainly because energy will be a limiting factor on our economy, and economy a limit on population, far sooner than population by itself will cause problems substantially worse than today, possibly due to some of the factors Dr. Bartlett identifies in the lecture; perhaps I'm being naive.
If you'd like to check professor Bartlett's numbers as he suggests in the video, I suggest you start here, at the US govenrment's Energy Information Agency coal page:
http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=coal_reserves
On a related note, for some background on how China stands in the coal rush:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8064#more
We'll talk about natural gas, the hottest thing since the great recession, and why it's maybe not a great idea either, soon enough.
