The only thing that has seemed to ease my mind about the fact that we are using oil (a non-renewable resource) at such a prodigious rate is the fact that it is very difficult if not impossible to imagine an industrialized society that doesn't use oil. So we are left with an almost anthropic principle where either there has to be a way to move from a non-renewable society to a renewable one without causing a collapse, or all such societies are a dead end, and therefore most any society that tries to move away from an agrarian system is also a dead end.
I'm not saying that a magic bullet will come out and shoot down all of the problems we're having. But rather that starvation and death are not the inevitable results of peak oil, and that either most of the dire predictions people make about this are wrong, or it won't matter as there is no solution and we were screwed from the invention of the steam engine.
The prediction that I feel is most wrong is the prediction that, as oil begins to run out, people will starve because we will be forced off of the use of fertilizers. In my opinion, the net result of this will not be starvation. There are two end results here: either human and animal labor will again replace that of tractors and fertilizers as it was before, and we will move towards an agrarian economy, or, more likely, petroleum and methane will be repurposed towards agriculture and the price of food will go up (which will cause problems in the third world, but not catastrophic ones).
The thing that people who panic about this don't seem to understand is that it is the knowledge of biology and chemistry what is important here. If people realize that putting ammonia based fertilizers on plants improves their yields by a large factor, then there is almost no scenario in which those fertilizers (or other "organic" ones with similar properties) will not be used. Granted it may result in a higher price for agricultural goods, but considering how little of the oil we use today is directed towards fertilizers, and how great the use of fertilizers improves crop yields, it is much more likely that other activities (such as driving in a single passenger car) will be curbed before activities that feed millions of people are.
The key to eliminating the catastrophic scenarios that peak oil people envision is to change the shape of the available oil curve. Currently, we are in a limited period of "feast" between two large "famine" drop-offs. So the market gets used to a limited, say 50 year, period when oil is dirt cheap stuck between two periods when it is not very cheap or plentiful. It looks very much like a square wave. However, if we find a way to extend the peak, through efficiency or substitution, so that we have more time to find alternative energies, so that it looks more like a "rectangle wave", then there is no crises at all. It's a smooth transition much like the move from steam engine to diesel engine was for railroads.
Of course, if there is no alternative to petroleum, then it doesn't really matter which timeline you're using as you're just buying a small amount of time compared to the point in the future in which we are forced back into a 19th century, or earlier, type of transportation. So there's no use being all worked up about it in that respect as you can't fight it.
