Rob,

In the large, people will not give up stuff. That's reality. We are not going to voluntarily regress our living standards.

Bear in mind that circa 1450, Europe faced "peak wood". They didn't scale back and decide to live with less, and neither will we.

There is no magic pill, but there's a ton of natural gas, and hundreds of years worth of coal. We actually use oil mostly for driving, not power - and electric cars are a sad joke for anything beyond hyper-local.

I'd suggest you read the book "Power Hungry" - there's a link to it on my site. And, you might try "The Collapse of Complex Societies" as well. The author explains why - in a world with no unexplored spaces - a regression to lower living standards is highly, highly unlikely.

Just look at the trends in power usage, Rob - they all go up. Add in a growing population, and the you'll see that reducing the raw (never mind per capita, which is also unlikely) power consumption number is simply not going to happen.

Driving power usage back to the levels that even Kyoto asked for - given the growth of the population in the US since then - would mean kissing "always on" power goodbye.

If you think that's going to happen, I have some oil free land on the gulf coast for you :)