You know I am not usually the font of optimism in any discussion...so you'll have to first sink to my misanthropic perspective to see how I find the survival mission isn't as impossible as statistics make it out to be.

1. We've spent the last 100 years replacing useful human labor with fossil energy of a cheapness and work-magnifying power level so great that even the best minds don't realize how blind they are to real needs and work.

2. What this means is that the majority of current energy use is actually not necessary. Most transport energy is being consumed to move the vehicle, not the person or cargo. We are culturally groomed to live apart, in separate buildings for construction materials, land use, heating and air conditioning. The paradigm was established to make money by throwing away energy and materiel, not usefully applying them.

3. Most of the food is produced by <1% of the population to feed millions of consumers as patsies for billionaires and their spending habits; that can also go away.

4. The future will belong to people grounded in reality and regenerative/sustainable locale-based living.

We don't have to go back to caves, but we'll definitely have to step off the clouds(cities as we know them will be under water anyway) and get away from all those who sell sunbeams for gold. The key word here is "selling".

Cheap food and energy have made too many people forget how to cooperate and share. We see this trend temporarily reversed whenever there's a disaster, so our problem isn't that we can't cooperate and survive with much less: it's that our typical "normal" competitive consumptionism is based on a blind belief in "someone (else) will do something if it's important".