How will humanity manage peak oil and climate change impacts and promote an ordered and gradual transition to low carbon economies?

The strong environmental effects of greenhouse gas emissions derived from oil use and the negative socio-economic consequences of future oil scarcity make it urgent to shift to alternative affordable energy sources. A recent assessment of the International Energy Agency, an OECD prestigious institution, alerts that oil shortage and increased energy costs can easily be an immediate reality after the current financial crisis if massive and strategic investments in oil industry are not rapidly and massively implemented.

Multiple economic, scientific, technological and political pathways should be implemented to achieve this global energy transition. States should empower their national strategies to improve the efficiency in energy generation, transmission and consumption and thus reduce progressively carbon emissions. States should also facilitate the massive deployment of renewable energies and public transport, promote the progressive electrification of the car industry, and globally shift to sustainable strategies in many other economic sectors. At the international level, governments should rapidly promote multilateral and bilateral cooperative agreements on energy and climate policies. In addition, states might promote the creation of a United Nations international programme to facilitate and coordinate a world-wide ordered and non-traumatic transition to low-carbon and energy-efficient economie. This UN international programme could develop or facilitate multilateral regulatory agreements to avoid the emergence of speculative dynamics and volatility on oil prices that ultimately damage economic stability and increase ongoing global food-security crisis. Finally, I advocate for a much greater scientific effort urgently placed on the interactions between peak oil, climate change and global society change. The scale, urgency and severity of peak oil and climate change mean that no action is too small to matter, too large to contemplate, or too soon to begin. There is not much time left.

How can we develop a commercially economical method of making hydrogen?

Hydrogen is amply abundant in the form of H20, and if a viable way to separate it can be found, it can be used to produce energy and enable the world to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels considerably and go a long way toward mitigating climate change.

Is it too early to research and develop the production of gasoline from air-captured CO2 reacted with electrolytic H2?

Non-fossil, non-biofuel gasoline and diesel is unequivocally sustainable into the 21st century. It will take decades to develop, demonstrate, prototype,and industrialize on a terascale.

How can society transition away from depleting conventional fossil fuel energy without exacerbating climate change by using poorer quality fossil fuels in greater quantities, such as coal or tar sands, and without causing major economic collapse(s) and or massive starvation and famine?

Climate change is of the utmost importance but is, at a fundamental level, a symptom of over-consumption of fossil fuels. We live, to put it simply, in the Age of Oil, and oil is depleting rapidly, and to properly address climate change we need to properly address the cause of the symptom, not the symptom itself. Analyzing current energy consumption patterns so that we as a society are able to slowly power down from a fossil fuel based civilization to a solar based civilization will, in the words of Faber et al. (1996), define how we transition to the next “paradigmatic image of the world”.