David Holmgren, co-originator of the permaculture concept, and author of the deep ecology treatise “Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability” has examined the challenges of our times and created a web-based book at www.FutureScenarios.org where he describes in detail how society will react to the issues of climate change and peak energy.
Holmgren begins with explaining four general scenarios.

Global energy use by humans over time. We are currently at a peak of energy production and will unlikely produce the same amount as we have before.

Techno Explosion assumes that our current trajectory of exponential growth continues due to some miraculous discovery of near limitless energy. This would ultimately lead to environmental disaster as resource extraction, food production, population, pollution and economic activity all increase as the available energy rises, as has been the case since modern civilization began.

Techno Stability is the mainstream green expectation that we will be able to have a steady-state economy and energy production plateau, with renewable energy sources coming on line as rapid as fossil fuels decline. I agree with Holmgren that this is also an unlikely scenario, as the creation of renewable energy generation infrastructure will continue to use considerable non-renewable resources, if it is even possible to run civilization on the scale of today.

Collapse assumes that humans are fully subject to ecological patterns and that we have greatly overshot our carrying capacity, leading to a massive population die-off and lower resource capacity than we started with, mirroring boom-and-bust cycles of deer on an island or any typical animal predator-prey relationship that becomes out of balance. The implications of a collapse are shocking, depressing and generally foster a mentality of inaction.

Energy Descent recognizes that a controlled reduction in energy use is likely the best way to adapt to lower energy availability with the least amount of human suffering. It will likely be a series of plateaus and economic disruption as new balance points are met for a time before further reduction in energy causes a move to a lower state of economic activity. Other authors have titled this the Long Emergency, or Powerdown scenario.

The responses we can expect from individuals up through to nations will depend on the severity of climate change on our food production and the rate of energy decline.

Responses to climate change and energy decline depend on severity and interaction between the two issues

If both climate change and energy decline are mild, as is currently the case, Holmgren describes a gradual move toward Green Tech, with a gradual distributed powerdown. If climate change becomes severe, governments may step up with a Brown Tech solution, attempting to deal with environmental changes through legislative reduction in greenhouse gas emissions as well as engineering responses to reduce damage through infrastructure upgrades. This would require more energy and resources, so ultimately a concerted response to climate change may worsen energy decline, leading to a Lifeboat scenario, where it becomes necessary to decide what to save and what to discard from our civilization and way of life.

As rapid energy decline sets in, use of “dirtier” energy sources such as coal will be pressed into action, reinforcing climate change in a reinforcing loop that could push civilization into collapse.

Finally, if energy decline is rapid but climate change is not severe, we may be able to enter in a bottom-up rebuild of civilization beginning with relocalization by necessity as transportation dwindles with less and less petroleum available for our vehicles. This Earth Stewardship approach is most suited to permaculture techniques and a controlled energy descent scenario.

Holmgren suggests that all four responses will likely happen in succession as well as simultaneously – both in geography and in social structures. He predicts that a lifeboat scenario will be on individuals’ minds as a primary response to ensuring family survival, while neighbourhoods will become local again with an earth steward approach.

Responses to climate change and energy time will be different at each level of human society

Really, both Lifeboat and Earth Stewardship scenarios are already present for the majority of the world’s peoples, which the Western world deems as “developing”. Ordinary people in “developing” nations, outside of the megacities, have a great deal to teach us about living off available local resources and within carrying capacity.

Bioregional societal structures such as regional municipalities and entire provinces might take on a green tech response while a federal government imposes a brown tech response at all levels. Add in the tug-of-war between these interconnected responses through energy use and greenhouse gas emissions and it’s impossible to predict how our global civilization will change.

Ultimately, if nothing else, our current rapid pace of life has prepared us for continued change. Many generations into the future humans will once again live in relative harmony with nature and flow with natural cycles, hopefully retaining useful knowledge from our relatively short-lived spike of energy consumption. It may be possible to encode the lessons of unconstrained human growth in the stories we tell, to prevent a runaway train from occurring again.