However, faced with that knowledge you have a very difficult hand to play. Obviously as we lose the might that a monopoly on fossil fuels has bought us, we leave our nation open to exploitation from other nations. The trick is to reduce your dependency on oil, while not reducing your economic might and ability to use oil in order to gain economic might. It's a tight rope that any UK goverment will have to walk. We don't want to simply ditch oil, and start living in mud huts tomorrow, or we will pretty quickly find ourselves at the mercy of other nations. We already will be at the mercy of other nations to a great and greater extent as the north sea winds down.
War does not happen between 'civilised' nations any more, because it is an expensive waste of time, money and energy. It is also unpopular with voters. The same can be achieved through the markets and the might of an economy. Wars are waged in the currency and commodity markets rather than on the battle field.
Really there are only two paths that the goverment can follow that I can think of (I haven't spent much time thinking about this. Perhaps I will);
a) become entirely self sufficient in a very short space of time - a massive effort. - YOu would need to maintain enough oil reserves and machinary to defend the realm from the later stages of the wind down, when markets fail and wars begin again.
b) Maintain relative economic might and ensure (via markets e.g. the carbon credits markets) that you can force other to give up fossil fuels at the same or at a faster rate than you. They have to sell oil, in order to buy credits to burn oil. Or they get isolated economically and starve. Following this path it would one assumes be easier to ensure stocks of oil and machinery in order to defend the realm when markets collapse and wars begin again.
As alluded to in the OP, admission of PO may cause a complete collapse of fiat currency and markets would become dysfunctional very quickly. However, a precedent has been set. The banks will be kept alive with tax payers money in order to ensure that we can wage war and secure oil, food and mineral resources via the markets, rather than having to spend hugely on resource grabbing or controlling wars such as Iraq and Afganistan. I think the UK goverment will go down route b) above. They will also try to make the UK more self sufficient as that will be needed after the global markets break down.
Welcome back MacG. I've just bought the black swan on your age old recomendation, but have 'The end of food' and 'Forest Gardens' to read first!
) are there. Dylan Thomas could only write poetry when he was drunk.