Today we began. After being excited about breakfast and lunch from spiffy sustainable restaurants, we heard from our professor about the dire future of the atmosphere. We heard from Crude Awakening that the days of cheap oil are ending.  Then I heard from Sandra Postel that water is intrinsically linked to energy--each requires the other for production.
What can we do in the face of these things?  We talk about oil like it is security.  Oops.  That's an idol.  We build our lives and our imaginations around it.  The point of Sabbath is not to reduce consumption.  It only reduces it by what, 14%?  (1 in 7 days of not using electricity/fuel.)  That's no long-term solution to peak oil.  Even if everyone did it, it would turn 10-20 years until prices skyrocket into 11-23 years.  But when our imaginations and our social systems know ways of being that are not dependent on petroleum, our imaginations can be restored to thankfulness and we can worship the God who is truly our security, our safety, our Creator and Sustainer.
Sandra Postel gave some terrifying numbers--we're not just using rivers, streams, and rains, folks.  Lakes and aquifers are dropping not because of drought but because we're sucking them dry to water our crops.  Our water use is 70% agricultural, 20% industrial, and 10% city/town.  But, lest you think that you are powerless to begin some kind of change, you make choices about agriculture every day.  Check out the table on p. 9 of the Postel article for foods listed by water used in production.
I ran some numbers.  It sounds like solar is the most feasible "post-petroleum" option (though you still need plastics to make it--doh)--nuclear would just deplete uranium instead of petroleum if we switched to it completely, wind is unreliable, etc.  Anyway, if we had a solar field half the size of California, Crude Awakening said, we could make a go of it.  This is 1.7 times as much area as the entire interstate highway system covers.  This would be a huge undertaking.
Another musing.  If a person is 125 lb (a low average), 65 lb of which are water (a low estimate), 7 billion people are made of 455 billion lb of water, which is 206 million cubic meters of water.  So it's not as if the water gets "stuck" somewhere.  We just use more in ways that don't get it back to the rivers and aquifers.
Anyway, beware of worshipping the system that seems to feed you.  Be crude to your Mother and your crude will not mother you.