The study – "Windfall for All: How Connected, Convenient Neighborhoods Can Protect Our Climate and Safeguard California's Economy" – was conducted by Oakland-based TransForm, formerly the Transportation and Land Use Coalition. TransForm is a coalition that includes nonprofits, environmental advocates and labor unions.

Some would label Ruppert a conspiracy theorist. In Collapse, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this fall, he asserts that he deals in "conspiracy fact." Whether you agree, disagree or fence-sit, there is no denying it: His notions about the impact of declining oil reserves and looming global catastrophe do not sound like ideas from the fringe, as they may have several years ago.

"Social psychologists have now known for four decades that the relationship between people's attitudes and knowledge and behavior is scant at best," said McKenzie-Mohr. Yet campaigns remain heavily focused on brochures, flyers and other means of disseminating information. "I could just as easily call this presentation 'beyond brochures,'" he said.

Environmental problems are difficult to solve because Earth is a "public good". Even though we would all be better off if everyone reduced their environmental impact, it is not in anyone's individual interest to do so. This leads to the famous "tragedy of the commons", in which public resources are overexploited and everyone suffers."

...There are 2 thresholds occurring in resource depletion space. 1)the shifting but low odds on steering the societal Titanic ( turbo-capitalism) away from the iceberg (energy decline) and 2) what individuals are doing to increase their own odds of success of navigating the coming transition. Progress on one is probably uncorrelated to progress on the other."

Treating nature and its benefits like other goods in the marketplace would also make it easier to carry out a more sophisticated cost-benefit analysis in sectors like fisheries, where resources are badly stretched, said Mr. Sukhdev, who is on leave from Deutsche Bank, where he headed the bank’s global markets business in India.

Oil has now plunged to less than 1/3 of last year's peak and one wonders whether the prophecy of it hitting $200 will ever come true.

In order to make this amusing case, OI created the graph below by plugging in US domestic oil production by barrel and the songs from Rolling Stone magazine's Greatest 500 Songs of All Time feature onto the same timeline.

While economic activities are traditionally viewed as being motivated by profit, Annila and Salthe argue that the ultimate motivation of economic activities is not to maximize profit or productivity, but rather to disperse energy. "

He says "peak oil" has already been reached, meaning that petroleum supplies will continue to fall and prices rise until gasoline, plastic, pesticides and other oil-derived products become unaffordable.

Economic growth is supposed to deliver prosperity. Higher incomes should mean better choices, richer lives, an improved quality of life for us all. That at least is the conventional wisdom. But things haven’t always turned out that way.

Michael Ruppert proudly claims that he predicted the global economic slump more than four years ago in his self-published "From the Wilderness," a monthly news publication and Web site. A narcotics investigator for the Los Angeles police department in the 1970s, Mr. Ruppert left the department and spent years trying to expose links between the CIA and drug smuggling; after 9/11, he wrote the 2004 bestseller "Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil," published by New Society Publishers and a favorite among conspiracy theorists.