Well, I'm not really "writing off" modern civilization--merely the extent of it. I'm in the natural gas processing equipment industry and we've done plenty of stuff on the production end, too, which often includes oil. A very good friend of mine owns a business that has provided a lot of equipment for processing the Canadian bituminous sands so I'm not oblivious to their existence, not by a long shot. I have even been consulted on solving some minor technological problems with respect to certain process controls for that recovery effort. In short, I'm more personally connected with the carbon-based energy industry than simply using the Internet to supply the materials needed to argue on this forum for argument's sake. However, I neither believe nor expect you to believe that that makes anything I have to say on the subject as absolute and inviolate.
One of the things that I'm trying to point out is the cost of energy relative to the use of that energy, and how that relationship affects world economics. It may be argued that the world's population is actually an integral of the world's production of energy as a commodity. As an illustration, we can say that the level of water in a tank is an integral of inflow with respect to outflow. When inflow is greater than outflow, the level increases and if the reverse is true then the level decreases. If they're equal, then the level remains constant. If we mathematically describe the two terms and plot them with respect to time then we can accurately track the level changes (given that the tank dimensions are known) without actually having to measure the level. That renders an argument of generality into an argument of specificity but it's also an extremely simple problem that nobody's going to argue about. With global population and energy consumption, it's obviously a much more complex issue to accurately define the terms, especially when the morality or fairness of conspicuous consumption is required to be included in said terms.
For my part, I could wish wholeheartedly that my personal cry of "the sky is falling" would be just that: a misinterpretation of facts. Unfortunately, there are a host of other more highly placed individuals who are in agreement. Some of the essays on the implications are rather worse than I had thought. Here's an interesting piece on some of the possible effects of a downturn in oil availability:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3017/
Pidgey
