sendler2112 said:
The longer we cling to the false hope of a startrek techno-salvation, the more time we waste in designing an all new world social system that can thrive on degrowth.
I think clinging to hopes for a Star Trek techno-salvation, a Max Max apocalyptic collapse or a Little House on the Prairie agrarian society are equally silly, because none of them will happen. The future will be different from anything we imagine. People 100 years ago certainly couldn't have accurately predicted the big issues facing us today (climate change, social media problems, economic stratification) or our solutions. Likewise, we won't see the next problems coming or their solutions.
Thus the goal is to get there in one piece. The best thing that's happened in the past 20 years is the rapid growth of renewables and alternative transportation options. This provides a readily-rampable alternative when it _really_ becomes economically unviable to keep using oil. This will require us to use less energy, since the lower EROEI means there's just less to begin with.
But saying "therefore society must collapse to X level" isn't supportable either. For all we know, small modular thorium reactors could start powering every airplane, small town and large ship in the world in 40 years - and suddenly we're growing again. And that's just the technology we can see coming. It might be one of the cold-fusion reactions, an easy to support hot-fusion reaction, even just much, much better batteries that store energy in atomic rather than chemical processes. A cheap 10 kilogram, 10 megawatt-hour battery would change the world so much that it would be unrecognizable in 10 years.
Or a global war could send society back 100 years. Or climate change could redraw the borders of the world. Or a pathogen could wipe out most of humanity, and turn our current oil supplies into 500-year supplies. Or we could keep going with exactly the same technology, and slowly replace our energy and raw materials sources, ending up with a less energy intensive society. The only thing that's really certain is that we don't know which of those will come to pass.