Audio by title peak_oil

"The population we have right now--which is 7 billion people--cannot be sustained in the future w/ the energy sources that are going to be available... oil is such a special and unique substance that there is nothing that can replace it."

He said the Green Revolution that has been a tool for helping to feed the world's ever growing population (or at least that's what conventional wisdom holds), relies heavily on copious amounts of relatively cheap petroleum.

More or less summarizing and paraphrasing ideas from William Catton Jr's book Overshoot, James said human beings are similar to other species in terms of our numbers drastically increasing as we access more and more resources and then crashing as those resources diminish.

About his own prospects in a peak oil world, James said, "I'm a pessimist. I don't see myself surviving beyond a certain point. Once people realize life-as-we-know-it is basically going to end, and we have to go back to another type of living, I think it's going to be chaos...a lot of us are just not going to make it."