Martin, this is a surprisingly TEOTWAWKI post from you!

One common feature of these doomsday predictions/essays is to take a current trend and extend it indefinitely and assume that society doesn't otherwise adapt to largely negate it. I mean, like the end of oil. Yes, we'll eventually use most of it up, but knowing human ingenuity, we probably will have found a different energy source by then and the world will look very different than the predictions. We switched from wood to coal to oil. What's next? I think we could be very surprised by what that next energy source turns out to be because of some yet-undiscovered breakthrough in technology. Personally, I would like to avoid becoming a human battery like in the movie The Matrix, so hopefully our scientists come up with a different solution than that to oil.