I cannot treat economists seriously until they comes up with a believable scheme to organize substitutes for oil.

Not just oil, but non-sustainable resources of every sort.

Today's crank economics - which as someone said recently is about as sane, empirical, coherent and effective as Galen's medical texts - assumes that money is the primary resource, and money can buy anything it wants to.

The money has to be good money, but as long as there's enough of it in at least some peoples' hands, shortages are impossible.

This is crackpot nonsense, for obvious reasons.

There are only two core commodities - scientific, engineering and cultural inventiveness, and raw resources, including energy sources.

Any useful system has to take these as the basis of its accounting system, and make 'money' contingent on them.

Chris's land credits and oil credits are all specific cases of this more general principle.

And if you turn the view around to consider sustainables as a valuable potentially everlasting resource, you get the interesting result of having an element of 'natural prosperity' - a constant source of 'income' which potentially underpins the rest of the economy, and is available for free.

Non-renewables become very much more expensive in this frame - how can you price something which literally can never be replaced?