[johnmarkos]

Bruce Sterling is having a conversation with a group of Well members about the future at his annual "State of the World" discussion at the Well. Non-Well members can view the discussion and email in questions.

Sterling gets into peak oil specifically in posts 39 and 42, but there's a lot of other good discussion of the future in there as well.

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/to ... age02.html

[diogenes]

His arguments are rather poor.

People don't seem to understand that a nation which has peaked internally or which has supply problems is not the same as the world having peaked. Even nations as isolated as Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany have or had access to the produce of other nations.

Furthermore--this is just a minor thing--the population of the world has tripled since 1930.

[johnmarkos]

You're reading him wrong. Read it as literary nonfiction, not as debate or reportage. He's not predicting; he's opining on how the future might appear, using metaphors and historical examples (see my sig below).