Hi Epyx,
welcome to our website! And unfortunately, yes, the situation is serious. Your friends are right: there will always be alternative forms of energy, but that's not the problem. The problem is: it is highly unlikely that those alternative forms of energy will be able to sustain the present global population. As a matter of fact, it's not even possible now, if you think of those recurrent African famines, so without oil, or with an ever increasing oil price, it's unthinkable.
Another thing is: peak oil is not just about energy. It's also about the rising costs of manufacturing plastics, clothing, pesticides (and thereby food), computers. Our life style is based on plastics for which oil is indispensable, , on cheap clothing for millions and millions of people for which oil is indispensable, on cheap abundance of food, and increasingly on computers. Did you know it takes ten times the weight in oil to produce one computer? Check this story on a rather recent
UN rapport.
And that's only one example about our utter dependence in oil. Is peak oil imminent? Well, we can't exactly tell, but the latest reports about at least 2 out of 3 largest oil fields in the world aren't particularly reassuring...Mexico's Cantarell which is number 2 seems to be producing an increasing amount of water instead of oil, while number 3, in Quwait, seems to be much smaller than believed for a long time. Number 1, the giant oil field Gazhwar in Saudi Arabia, may also be in trouble, producing an increasing amount of water instead of oil.
Peak oil is also about time. How much time do we really have to develop a reasonable amount of alternatives? We just can't tell. The only thing we do know: we're probably moving too slowly anyhow.
Would peak oil harm us? Let's take Sweden for an example. Your government is planning to be independent from oil by 2020. Are they really? So what about one of the primary motors behind Swedish economy, IKEA? IKEA would not be as sucesful as it is, were it not for cheap kerosene. They can produce their products at ridiculously low prices and still make a profit, thanks to the availability of cheap air transport. There is no viable alternative to kerosene, at least to my knowledge. Without air transport globalisation is a dead duck. Swedish economy, much as so many other western economies, invariably depends on oil, even if the government would be able to reduce the dependency on the home front...
So well, that's where we're at..The press here in Europe (I'm in the Netherlands) does not report too widely on peak oil. It may have to do with their obsession with Islam and cartoons etcetera.. And nobody wants to be the harbinger of bad news. But trust me, as a news editor here I can tell you that in the Anglosaxon press peak oil awareness is heavily on the rise. It will not take long before the news will break in our continent too.
Meanwhile, don't get too depressed! Remember: we, peakoilers, know what's in store, so we have time to prepare, however inaptly, but at least we know what's cooking.