In the medium term, cheap energy is ridiculously important for the simple reason that scientific and technological innovation rely on functioning civil societies to support them, generating enough of an economic surplus to pay for the innovation. These civil societies in turn depend on an infrastructure that operates at a certain energy efficiency. The infrastructure becomes unsustainable if energy costs rise beyond a point.

There are going to be 9 billion people on the planet in another few decades, with a huge chunk of them old, retired, sick and economically unproductive.

This population has to be fed, watered, kept somewhat healthy, secure and supplied with at least the standard of living they enjoy (or suffer) now.

We need an infrastructure to deliver all this at this scale. This is what many tech-utopians miss. Just because some motivated group of 50 people managed to create a self-sustaining 90% localized lifestyle somewhere in an eco-village, being intellectually honest enough to even eschew grid power and the Internet, does not mean we can do the same for 9 billion people. And within the 20-30 years we have? Chances are very slim indeed.

The only way we know to deliver this today is through our current landscape of industrial era institutions and trade. And this infrastructure landscape is very very energy hungry.

So even to maintain current levels of civil society will take vastly more energy simply due to population growth. This is why China for instance (which is leaping ahead on both innovation and population) has turned into a modern-day colonial power in Africa, rapidly locking up resource supplies wherever it can.

The good and bad news is that this attempt to keep up is going to fail. Drastically fewer working age people supporting way more elderly around the world, in an environment of declining resources and rapidly slowing productivity gains, at a scale 50% larger than today? Doesn't sound do-able to me.

And doing it with enough economic surplus left over to support today's innovation models? Fuggedaboutit. LHC? Mars shots? No money, sorry. In a way those are the wrong kinds of innovation goals to think about anyway. You only need specialized, delicate tools at the diminishing marginal returns edge of an incumbent innovation paradigm. But even the right kinds of innovation that don't require that kind of infrastructure will become very very hard. People like Newton were of the upper classes living off serf-labor economic surplus to a large extent. Greek philosophers did what they did because there were slaves around to do the rest. So even that kind of capability is under threat.

Which means all we can do is delay the collapse as long as possible and hope that a better economic model (with a better innovation model included, and one that runs a far more energy-efficient infrastructure supplying at least as good a standard of living) will have booted up and gathered sufficient momentum and scale by then to take over.

It's basically a race against time. We already know some of the obvious things. Take the obvious prediction that a lot of energy-intensive travel will be replaced by digital communication that takes far less energy to do the same job. Of course it will happen eventually. But it doesn't take a genius to figure out that a change that involves killing of most business travel (and the hotel industry, and management styles involving a lot of travel...) isn't going to happen overnight. Car-based suburbia won't be replaced by zipcar/shared-bicycle neo-urban utopias by next Tuesday in the 21 megacities that exist today (10 million plus population).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg...

If we can't fix megacities in time what are the chances for the next tier can be? And it isn't like people aren't trying:

http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet...

What happens to innovation in the traditional sense while all this racing against time is going on? It will start to collapse and what's left will increasingly go towards maintenance problems rather than growth problems. All the startup cheerleaders don't realize the extent to which they are basically capturing returns from government and corporate R&D from decades ago, invested through government agencies and the university system. Today, there is no money and stomach for something like ARPANET. DARPA is all about narrow "blood money" visions today, and more than half the federal R&D budget today goes to NIH and healthcare related R&D (which is money pumped into an unsustainable healthcare system delivering to an increasing population through bankrupt entitlement schemes). And oh yeah, the university system that supplied the talent for the innovation? Also collapsing under the pressure of keeping up with the challenges.

If you think a few thousand people with Stanford-level overpriced engineering degrees and a Y-combinator style "experience" are enough to solve the problem of shifting to a lower-energy infrastructure at the scale of 9 billion people, and within the 30 or so years we have before collapse starts to loom large... think again. Severe impedance mismatch.

Will we win this race against time? I doubt it. I suspect things will come to crisis levels by around 2050 and we'll see the start of a new Dark Age, like with Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire (the symbolic start point is the sacking of Rome in 410 AD, and the Renaissance took another 1000 years to kick off).

This is not necessarily a bad thing. The Dark Ages weren't awful hellish times. They were just a time when things got messy and illegible and nobody could make much sense of what was going on. Intense innovation continued in the dark (the Renaissance would be credited for a lot of stuff that actually happened in the Dark Ages).