You guys flippantly suggesting alternatives to plastics don't get it. Peak oil in a nutshell doesn't mean that oil is gone, it means that cheap oil is gone. There's still oil but it gets more and more expensive to pump it, the easy to get stuff has been all used up.
Now, since many fertilizers are petro-chemical based let's investigate what happens. Fertilizer becomes more expensive, guess what else is more expensive? Fuel. What runs on fuel? Farm machinery. Forget about Bio Diesel, because the fertilizer costs a whole lot more now, remember? Bio Diesel is now some expensive shit. Okay, so we have our new expensive crop and what do we have to do? Ship it. More expensive fuel costs. Okay, now that we've got it to a distributor now what? Oh, that's right! We have to package it! What kind of packaging do we use? Plastics! Which are now also a lot more expensive to manufacture
and remember, bio-plastics aren't a really viable alternative because they're now super expensive to manufacture because fertilizer costs so much more.
The whole plastics thing is a pretty big deal. Look around you and take note of how much of the shit around you is plastic and how much more those things would cost to have them manufactured (and shipped!) out of alternative materials.
Really, peak oil is pretty much a downhill ride into doomsday. I don't think America and the world could adjust fast enough once people finally wake up to the problem. Look at what's been going on with the US economy for the last eight years and the
whole time pretty much every publication was filled with denials of a growing recession from all kinds of economists. I mean, how does that happen when every blue collar person around was fully aware that things were on a downslide?
If you think Peak Oil is a joke just look at what happened after only a few months of $4.00 per gallon gas prices. I really don't think it was a coincidence that the world's economy exploded after a year or two of more and more outrageous oil prices.
Personally, I hope the Russians are right.