Background
Peak Oil
"Are we running out of oil? I though there was 40 years of the stuff left"
Oil will not just "run out" because all oil production follows a bell curve. This is true whether we're talking about an individual field, a country, or on the planet as a whole.
Oil is increasingly plentiful on the upslope of the bell curve, increasingly scarce and expensive on the down slope. The peak of the curve coincides with the point at which the endowment of oil has been 50 percent depleted. Once the peak is passed, oil production begins to go down while cost begins to go up.
An oil based economy such as ours doesn't need to deplete its entire reserve of oil before it begins to collapse. A shortfall between demand and supply as little as 10 to 15 percent is enough to wholly shatter an oil-dependent economy and reduce its citizenry to poverty.
For an excellent explanation of the implications of peak oil to local communities, see this page on Transition Leicester's website.
Click here for an interactive oil depletion atlas.
Climate change
 According to DEFRA: "Climate change is the greatest environmental challenge facing the world today. Rising global temperatures will bring changes in weather patterns, rising sea levels and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather. The effects will be felt in the UK; internationally there may be severe problems for people in regions that are particularly vulnerable."
It has become fashionable in some parts of the UK media to rubbish climate change, claiming that scientists have a vested interest in playing up the potential effects that climate change is likely to have. See the Royal Society's report "Facts and Fictions about Climate Change" here.
Collapse of the Economy
The global economic system relies for its existence on continued growth. The problem is that nothing can continue to grow indefinitely, so at some point there will be a systemic collapse as predicted by the Club of Rome in 1972. New sustainable economic models are needed, particularly when cheap energy is no longer available to fuel the economy.
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/02/climatechange-economicgrowth for an article describing why growth-based economics is fundamentally flawed.
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