Right about now youshould  be thinking: what the heck? Without all the goodies above, how will we eat, sleep and get to work? And what will we do when we get to work? This is where the good news comes in. This vision of the future might sound like a return to a distant past with one important exception: technology. Our standard of living as it has been measured by the folks who make Coke, jet skies, Big Macs and Hummers is going to change no matter who is in the White House, the planet is making sure of that right now. It’s just a matter of when we change and how much it hurts. Global warming is going to cost us all so much that all the jetskies, Hummers, McMansions, and $5 supermarket ribeye steaks are going to disappear. As will the industries providing them. Unemployment in those industries will jump to levels not seen since the 1930s and people will have a whole lot of time on their hands to think about what went wrong. It’s the end of the world as we know it, right? Wrong!

This is not the 1930s. Even the poorest folks today have easy internet access with computers, tablets and phones that can be bought for roughly the cost of a really fancy restaurant dinner. Those devices can be used to make money from home as never before. At the same time scientific discovery and technology are increasing demand for such services and making it ever easier to provide them. Is it far-fetched to think an unemployed coal miner can contribute to Alzheimer’s research? No, it is not. To say otherwise is to say coal miners are somehow dumber than scientists, and they are not, they just don’t have the booklearning. That’s where the spare time and the internet come in. You want to go to MIT for free? Just click on this link.

Still, all the above means we will all have a lot less cash. It also means we will need a lot less cash. Health care costs will drop because our diets will improve dramatically from the reduction in fatty, sugary foods which will cost more to produce than grains, fruits and vegetables. Our concept of recreation will also change. No more spending two-months’ savings for a week’s vacation hyperstimulating our kids at Disney World. We’ll go hiking instead and be healthier for it. No more dollar-double cheeseburgers financed by leveling rain forests. No more 6,000 pound cars moving 400 pounds of family to after-school soccer games.

We’re running out of space for this column, and probably reader interest, but it doesn’t take great leaps of imagination to see that economic growth is not the only way to improve our standard of living. In the next few years it’s going to become increasingly obvious conservation is also a great way to get greater fulfillment from life. Technology is forcing on us much more free time than in the past and a truly capitalist country can not say no to technology. What we can do is leverage that technology so that we can that spend that free time without spending mountains of money. If this sounds like a bizarre notion, Ronald Reagan economist Paul Volker was saying this in 1979 shortly before this country’s worst president took office.

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When NBN waded  into the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s International Energy Outlook of 2011 we got that anxious feeling you get when you first start thinking you might be lost in a very large forest. There are all kinds of cool things to see but none of them reassuring. The Energy Outlook report produces the same unsettling lack of global direction on the single most important global measure, energy. It’s full of eye-popping numbers like: “Energy consumption grows by 53 percent from 2008 to 2035,” and “Energy use in [developing] nations increases by 85 percent…as compared with an increase of 18 percent for the [developed] economies.” As NBN pin-ball between such startling statistics, one prediction in the study lent us something of a compass point on which to draw some conclusion: “Much of the growth in energy consumption occurs in [undeveloped countries] where demand is driven by strong long-term economic growth.”

Wrong! There are already signs that the economies in China and India, the ones cited in the study as undeveloped, are slowing down. There are also signs of citizen unrest in those countries over the environmental cost of the economic advances they enjoyed so far. And—you heard it here first, folks—protests in those countries are going to grow dramatically as the cancer, and other autoimmune disease rates, skyrocket in those countries from those same environmental costs. Add on the growing demand for energy and natural resources from the massive populations these countries support and it’s hard to see where the “long term economic growth” the Energy Outlook predicts for these countries will come from. Quite the opposite: Take the environmental damage these countries have their done to their air, water, and land; add the dwindling world demand for cheap labor these countries used to fuel their economies; multiply that by their huge populations yearning for the standard of living “developed” counties enjoy, and you start to think that these countries are screwed.

There is only one resource left that these countries, and the rest of an economically depressed world, can continue to wring additional economic growth from: increasing efficiency in the exploitation of natural resources. Technologies like photovoltaics, fuel efficiency, low-impact development, organic farming, and water purification offer the only environmentally safe, sustainable opportunities for economic growth. But here’s the rub: These technologies can only succeed, at least at their present level of development, with dramatically reduced world consumption and both will eventually mean many fewer jobs available for a growing world population. Nowhere more so than in China and India. So, NBN dares to say that the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s International Energy Outlook of 2011 is dead wrong. Global energy consumption has to plummet or we’re all screwed.

Here’s the good news. The world, with the U.S. leading the way, has been so wasteful of natural resources, particularly energy, that we could well see an explosion of economic growth as we develop the technologies to curb our consumption of those natural resources. Just imagine the work required replacing our centralized power grid with solar panels on every roof in the world. Imagine the work involved and replacing all our cars with Chevy Volts. Imagine all the work involved in upgrading our wastewater treatment plants to tertiary systems. That economic growth will have to end, if these technologies work as designed. But if planned correctly, it could well be a very soft landing where we all find ourselves doing a lot less work to buy many fewer things. It really could be that simple.