"MELBOURNE residents could be asked to cut their daily water use to 150 litres each this summer to counter the looming shortage caused by poor spring rainfalls."

That's not very ambitious, we use 150lt/day total in a household with three adults - 50lt each.

I think Phil is away (ie. no Bullroarer tonight) but here's a story I noticed in the Curious Snail:

The end of the milk delivery era proved more difficult to deal with. I didn't see it coming, and so it was for my neighbours. We got a note one morning from our regular milkman informing us he would not be coming after the end of the week. Most of us expected he had sold the business.

But no one came in his place. And so started the three trips-a-week milk run to the local shops.

Without rational cause, so it seemed, where one day a suburb of some thousands of customers were served by one vehicle moving in the most efficient route around the streets, now we had thousands of individuals driving to the shops for nothing more than a bottle or two of milk, at considerable inconvenience.

There was additional petrol cost and wear and tear on thousands of cars. In this era, just over 20 years ago, there was very little interest in, or understanding of, climate change and other forms of atmospheric pollution.

The dismissal of the milkman is starting to seem like a bad decision given our advance in knowledge.

But worse was to come. In the era of the milko, the empty milk bottles would be put out with the cat, to be replaced with full ones next morning.

We would let the cat in as we brought the bottles in. And it all worked a treat.

As customers we did not know for certain, but had a rough idea that the average life of a bottle was 30 refills. Most of us also knew that the empties were not washed-out by hand, as on school factory visits we had seen first-hand the automated washing of Coke bottles. So it would be for milk bottles.

We soon discovered that the pleasant-to-feel, robust glass bottle was not stocked in the shops.

Plastics and cardboard containers, on a one-way track, had replaced the reusable bottle. We asked ourselves, had we as consumers demanded this of the milk firms? We certainly had not marched outside the large supermarkets threatening to withhold our custom if they did not remove the glass bottles which had served society from its earliest times.

The plastic bottles, as with all conventional plastic, are made from oil. The was no serious concern about Peak Oil, or the price of its derivatives at the servos when the replacement of glass bottles happened.

And another from Micheal Lardelli at Online Opinion - Peak oil and retirement:

Stockmarkets are plunging worldwide and retired people everywhere are watching with great discomfort as the value of their investments decline. Declining retirement incomes and inflating food and fuel prices are placing great stress on the elderly. The current dramatic volatility in the oil price is symptomatic of the tight supply (amplified by speculation and the current financial chaos) and is what one expects as the world peak of oil production is approached.

For many of us in the middle of our working careers the state of the stockmarket may not be as immediately worrying. However, the Australia of 2020 and beyond into which we will “retire” will be a very, very different place from 2008.
In only 12 years time Australia’s oil production will be but a small fraction of its peak rate in 2000. More importantly, the volume of oil available to buy on the world market is predicted to be at least 30 per cent lower than today meaning that oil prices will be far higher. (And if high oil prices are causing us to run a trade deficit in these commodity-export driven boom times then imagine the consequences of oil at far higher prices!)

There will be few private cars on the roads, and problems with food production and supply will drive a great increase in local growing of food (urban agriculture). We will be in the process of transitioning (with difficulty) to a society functioning (or “dysfunction”ing) at far lower energy levels compared to today. At the same time a growing cohort of elderly will be faced with fewer younger (productive) people in the economy to provide them with services.

What does declining energy availability mean for those of us entering retirement age beyond 2020? If we have some retirement savings now, what should we do with them? Will we be able to retire at all? ...