Now you think that hybrid cars and plugin hybrids will save the day. I read that there are about 205 million cars in the United States. To replace all of those cars with nothing but hybrids is going to take a long time, and lots of economic growth that honestly is going to get squeezed by oil depletion.
One thing that you haven't really understood is the fact that building new industry for coal and coal liquification, car replacement, and electricity is going to take a massive amount of energy in a time where the world is in depletion. We can expect 3% yearly depletion of oil. Under good economic conditions, coal has only grown about 2% per year. In a long lasting recession, expect coal to grow 1% per year.
Just accept for a moment that coal liquification will not keep pace with oil depletion. How can we expect to eventually get out of the recession if coal liquification and other alternative energy can never be expected to keep pace with depletion? My answer is that that depletion will continue to outpace alternative energy, and we won't be able to transition to a different economy until the population goes way down to accomodate the new levels of energy.
Even if the world population stayed the same for a whole year, that would mean a dieoff in some parts of the world. Check out this site.
http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop
I have calculated that on the first day of 2004 to the first day of 2005 world population grew by 93,236,423. Think about it. Just for the world population to stay the same for one year, the death rate has to go up that many people! I heard the Indian Ocean tsunami was only about 150k people killed. It would be a worldwide disaster just for the population to stay the same for one year. That's how insane our population has become.
Now, to tie the above paragraph into my point. Since we can expect that alternative energies will never keep pace with depletion, we can expect at the best of circumstances hundreds of millions of additional deaths in the first 10 years of depletion after peak oil. To go back to just 6 billion people in 10 years, the death rate would have to increase by roughly 150 million people per year during that period. That is how inevitable the dieoff is.