Last night I attended a lecture at a nice Upper West Side Restaurant by Geophysicist Klaus Lackner as part of Columbia University's Cafe Science series of science talks. He got right into by saying that that we are running out of oil, have probably hit the peak or close to it. But, he added, but there are plenty of energy sources around - specifically coal, uranium and solar. The trick is transitioning now in a responible manner. And he thinks that the best way to do so it by taxing or capping carbon emissions and developing a real plan for nuclear waste disposal.

This lecture was geared for the well educated lay person so he offered generalities on major subjects with only vague estimates of the numbers involved. Below is a brief outline of his lecture, which is not to say that he doesn't have hard numbers to back all this up, he just did not hand them out for us to write down. Still it would be interesting to follow up with his sources at some point.