You may want to patent this idea in case someone steals it from you. Stealing your hard earned (you had to think) intellectual property is a serious crime and should be treated as such.
That's an interesting system. Maybe you should patent it. I am thinking C++ (or Java) class libraries with classes that cover virtually every problem, graded by how efficiently the end result is achieved. But why make it a matter of who was first? I think if someone comes up with a more efficient implementation it should take the place of the previous one.
So basically you want to patent an idea. You came up with what you consider to be a good idea and you want to prevent anyone else from being able to use it. Are you sure that your idea doesn't use anyone else's ideas? Are you sure that it is truly original? No one has ever thought of anything like it? You aren't standing on the shoulders of anyone who came before you? Even if that is true, what exactly do you hope to accomplish by patenting it? Do you have the money to fight a prolonged legal battle against an infringer? Do you really think it is productive to spend all that effort in court instead of actually improving your software product? Is your idea truly so unique that your competitor cannot come up with an equally good way to accomplish the same thing? Finally, how are you going to know that someone copies your idea? Maybe they just came up with a similar idea on their own. You also may want to ask yourself whether your idea would still be possible if nearly every idea in the problem domain had already been patented?
Those are the exceptions. Not the rule. Most patents fail the obviousness test. And many fail the prior art test as well. Not only are they obvious, but they are not even original. I had one aspect of a product that I designed patented and it was utterly ridiculous. I was sure that the patent would be rejected, but it wasn't. There may not have been any prior art because it was so damn obvious. So in my case, the inventor (me) doesn't think that his invention is worthy of a patent because it fails the obviousness test and because it is more of an idea than an implementation, but the uspto disagrees. I really think you would have to work to find something that the uspto would not patent. I guess you can't blame them. That's how they make money. But the system is very broken.
You know, criminal cases have a backlog in the courts, too. Obviously, the way to fix this is to declare assault and battery no longer a crime.
You picked a bad example. How about legalizing victimless crimes, like drug possession? Russia just did something similar. They didn't legalize drugs per se, but instead of imprisoning drug users they just fine them each time they are caught with them. Even small time drug dealers are just fined. If we were to do something similar our overcrowded jails would be half empty.
If you aren't bothering to defend your original idea (give the man a cookie!) then what was the point of applying for the protection in the first place? Just in case someone else stumbled onto the same obvious idea? Sorry, but I do think your idea was pretty obvious. Actually implementing it would certainly represent progress, but trying to prevent others from doing so? For some reason your company hasn't done that. What if patents were like trademarks, where you lose them if you don't defend them?
Give an example of an idea that you could sell. Patents were never intended to protect your ideas. And if you feel that your ideas actually need some kind of protection, then I am willing to bet you are not very intelligent yourself. Intelligent people don't think like that. They know that truly original ideas are basically fiction. Let me sell you an idea: software patents are so ridiculous that only a complete idiot could have thought up that particular idea. How do you like them apples?
I work in a profession that, when functioning correctly, fosters innovation. I have no qualms about it.
You are in it because it pays well. Just like every other lawyer. Don't pretend that you have principles. And it doesn't foster innovation. It stifles it. That's why so many of us are against patents. The system only protects large corporations from smaller companies without large patent portfolios to trade. I wonder if there has ever been a single inventor whose invention has been protected by getting a patent. Maybe there have been some cases, but nowadays it almost never happens. I would never bother to file for patent protection. If a large company wants to copy my product there is nothing that I can do about it. What am I going to do? Sue them? Hahahahaha! And what if the company is in China? No. Patents are really only useful to large corporations for defensive use, so that they can get away with infringing patents by threatening to sue the other company for their patent violations. They are also useful to patent trolls like, say, Rambus. But to an actual inventor? Useless.
Are you saying software simply can't be inventive? That you can't possibly think of something in software that anyone else couldn't have thought of, even given the exact same problem set?
Software is just a series of instructions. So, no, it can't be "inventive". And even if I did think of something that no one had ever thought of before (although highly unlikely), I shouldn't be able to patent it. The patent system was not intended to protect original ideas. I did successfully patent the idea of doing cube roots on a computer though. And then proceeded to get a patent on square roots on the internet. This was after my infamous one click patent. The whole patent system is broken and, as a patent attorney, it sounds like you are part of the problem.
What will they make IV kits out of? Or rubber seals for syringes? What about tires for road vehicles. Will we make them out of wood or metal? Petroleum based long chain polymers are one of the things that make the modern world modern.
Burning coal for electricity produces an order of magnitude [doe.gov] more CO2 than oil does. Coal isn't going to run out anytime soon.
But coal will run out eventually. IIRC estimates are that coal will be too expensive due to a decreased supply in something like 50 years. That is not nearly enough time to turn the Earth into Venus. Of course if my livelihood depended on government grant money for research into the approaching armageddon of Global Warming I'm sure I would think differently so as not to have to get a job working at McDonalds or something.
I didn't realize that coal produced so much more CO2. If that's the case then switching to electric cars might actually lead to more CO2. Almost 50% of US electricity comes from coal. Only 1% comes from oil. More CO2 may actually be a good thing for the Peak Fossil Fuel problem. The more CO2 we have the faster our trees will grow. The faster our trees will grow the more renewable energy we can get from tree farms (aka forests).
For a longer-term fix we could try putting some serious money behind fusion research. I'm certain that ITER, and subsequently DEMO, could be operational a bit faster if they had three times the budget.
At the current amount we spend on fusion research a practical fusion reactor will always be 10 years away. If we triple the funding then it would always be 3.3 years away. If we increase the funding by 10 times then it will always remain only one year away. So I guess it makes sense.
If coal becomes a limited supply they can always burn oil.
Oil is a lot more scarce than coal at the moment. After oil becomes too expensive for anything but airplanes we will probably still have another 20 years of coal supply.
Electric cars currently do not remove the requirement to burn oil.
Only one percent of electricity in the US is from oil. 48% is from coal, 21% is from natural gas, 20% is from nuclear, 6% is from hydroelectric, 1% is from wind power, and 1% is from burning waste wood and garbage. The states with the most expensive electricity use mostly natural gas and/or nuclear. The states with the cheapest electricity use coal and/or hydroelectric.
Taxes are never earmarked like that. The taxation system just isn't set up to do that. Try again. BTW, with such high petrol prices, do Europeans use more electric vehicles? I would imagine that they might drive less. Last night I drove 52 miles (round trip) just to get a pizza. It took me 1 hour and 20 minutes and used about 2 gallons of petrol, which added about $5 to the cost of said pizza. If petrol prices were much higher I wouldn't have been able to make that trip. That's why I want to buy a Nissan Leaf.
We already have fuel taxes. That is not the answer. If oil truly is being subsidized then we should stop it immediately. Otherwise, we should try to transition to nuclear power as a medium term solution and spend some money on scientific research to come up with long term (100+ year) solutions. More taxes are never going to automagically solve any problems. Some degree of energy subsidies toward non-fossil fuel alternative energy might be worthwhile however. The reasoning for this is that the free market tends to only adjust for current conditions. If Peak Oil happens too abruptly, faster than we can build nuclear (and maybe some solar and hydro where feasible) power plants, then we will be in big trouble. We know that Peak Oil is going to happen. We just don't know when. So it may make sense to be a bit more prepared for it by subsidizing the alternatives. Needless to say, we shouldn't be building any more oil burning generators. All new non-nuclear power stations should be coal or natural gas. Although coal is cheaper.
Being a global warming denier is similar to being a free thinker. Not so long ago being an atheist/agnostic could get you burned at the stake. Global Warming as Catastrophe is not science. It is religion. Which is why you call us "deniers". Like atheists are deniers of god. When you make an assertion it requires evidence and the burden of coming up with that evidence is on those who are making the assertion. I do find the evidence that CO2 is slightly increasing over time to be convincing (regardless of what is causing it), and I agree that a slightly higher percentage of CO2 tends to lead to slightly higher atmospheric temperatures. As for the rest you have to be a true believer. I'm a skeptic. I don't believe in Global Warming (as a bad thing) for the same reason that I don't believe in a God. There is insufficient evidence to support the belief. Global Warming may or may not happen, and if it does happen it may be a good thing. I would view a cooling as much more dangerous. Luckily Global Cooling (The Next Ice Age!) is no longer the current fad. So it's not my responsibility to worry about that anymore, as I had to as a child when it was on all the magazine covers in the 70s. I figured by 2010 kids would be building snowmen in the summer.
That made my think of trolley cars. Some kind of car-train hybrid. I wonder if we could wire up our roads or at least our major highways with overhead high voltage lines made to power vehicles equipped with some kind of wire arm in order to either switch off the battery power or charge the batteries while you drive. Or maybe we could build a kind of "third rail" recessed into the road where vehicles could stick in some kind of wire. I wonder if there is some reason that we could not power our cars the same way we power many trains. Of course maglev monorails on every highway would be nice if we had cars that could adapt to them. This would be a beautiful system and we wouldn't need to rely on new battery technology. It would also have a nice feeling of "living in the future". Like the glass domed cities and flying cars that people in the 50s thought we would have by now.
Right, and coal won't running out until long after global warming has done its thing.
Citations please. Also, what is this "thing" you speak of? Do global warming theories take peak oil/coal into account? We don't have to run out of coal. Coal just has to become sufficiently expensive that coal plants cost more than nuclear plants. Right now coal is one of the cheapest sources of electricity. Only hydroelectric can compete.
Actually gasoline was something like 94 cents a gallon when I first started driving in 1986. I don't remember what it was in the 70s. My father told me that he can remember when gasoline was like 10 cents a gallon. Keep in mind that we have something like a 50 cent per gallon fuel tax now. We didn't have that in the 80s. Without the tax gas would be about $2.00 per gallon right now. So the (lowest) price has doubled since the late 80s.
Because you need something that can produce a couple of hundred horsepower, more or less continuously, and with a minimal "recharge" time.
This. This may be the core problem with Peak Oil. Whether or not we will have sufficiently good electric vehicle technology to make practical electric or fuel cell powered tractors. If not, and the cost of fuel is $400/gallon, I think we can expect the price of food to rise quite a bit. Will only the rich be able to afford to eat at all? I guess we could always just become cannibals. There seem to be no shortage of humans to go around. Pass the Long Pig.
There will be much more serious problems to deal with before we get there.
For instance?
According to the USDOE it should currently be profitable to make biodiesel from algae grown in the desert with seawater and optionally recapturing CO2 from coal or oil plants.
Wow. Talk about speculative. Enough biodiesel to power every motor vehicle on the planet? Hope we have a lot of desert land. We are going to need it. Let's wait until they prove that this works in practice before we start relying on it. It sounds to me that hydrogen production powered by nuclear generated electricity to power fuel cell vehicles is a lot more practical for land vehicles and maybe even some boats.
Probably a lot of people will go back to an earlier style of life where they don't heat the whole house.
Agreed. But I'm not sure that will really be necessary if we can build nuclear power plants fast enough. There may be some lag, but eventually electricity should be no more expensive than it is now in nuclear powered states or countries. I don't think we are talking much more than 20 cents per kilowatt hour. Probably a bit less. Especially if we could reduce some of the regulatory costs involved etc. Anyone who doesn't have 20+ acre wooded lots will be running on electric heat. Having your own combustion heat source will be thought of as an old fashioned extravagance like gas lanterns or something.
If we are talking about cows or horses or goats etc the answer would be grass. I'm afraid you will have to allow them to graze just as nature intended. Not too sure about pigs. The price of meat will definitely go up. Even the price of fish will get higher because electric or fuel cell powered boats are rather impractical due to range-energy density issues.
What do you suggest I heat my house with?
When our fossil fuels run down the only practical option will be electric heat via nuclear power plants. Fossil fuels and wood will just be too expensive. Wood in general is a renewable resource, but it is not likely to be renewable fast enough to heat everyone's houses in the winter. In your case 20 acres of fast growth trees may be enough to sustain you, but most people don't have 20 acre lots. Maybe when nearly every power plant is a nuclear power plant a lot of the costs will be reduced. We will just have to live with the risks. There won't be a lot of choice.
I agree that Peak Oil if and when it happens will be a gradual process. In fact, I believe that is what the theory itself states. Have you actually read the the theory itself? It sounds a bit like you haven't. Because you seem to be missing the point. The biggest problem as I see it comes down to energy density. We don't consider it practical to run land vehicles with nuclear power. So that leaves us with our very limited battery and fuel cell technology, which will have to scale up to massive levels to be used worldwide in every vehicle.
When petroleum sources become too expensive to use there are going to be some very major problems we have to deal with. Plastic is made from oil. Imagine a world where plastic is 100 times more expensive than it is now. Or 1000 times more expensive. And all of our land vehicles will have to be battery (or fuel cell) powered. This means that the range of land vehicles will be very short. No doubt petrol stations will also have high amperage, high voltage, electrical pumps and/or hydrogen pumps, but shipping freight via trucking will become relatively impractical. We may be able to substitute nuclear powered trains to some extent, but we will still need trucks to transport the cargo from the trains. Traveling by air will again only be for the rich. The cost of many, many items, such as food, will raise by orders of magnitude. Needless to say the cost of living in a cold climate will rise astronomically. The price of heating oil and natural gas and coal and even wood will all rise to many, many times the current price. Probably everyone will be using electric heat powered by nuclear plants, which is not cheap. For the rich, it won't be too much of a problem. It is the poor that will suffer. The most serious problem even for the rich will be when we finally start running low on uranium fuel, which is also a finite resource. Peak oil, if and when it happens will massively change the way we live our lives. Whether there truly are massive die offs of the human population is uncertain, but it is within the realm of possibility if we can no longer produce food cheaply enough to feed the world.
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You may want to patent this idea in case someone steals it from you. Stealing your hard earned (you had to think) intellectual property is a serious crime and should be treated as such.
That's an interesting system. Maybe you should patent it. I am thinking C++ (or Java) class libraries with classes that cover virtually every problem, graded by how efficiently the end result is achieved. But why make it a matter of who was first? I think if someone comes up with a more efficient implementation it should take the place of the previous one.
So basically you want to patent an idea. You came up with what you consider to be a good idea and you want to prevent anyone else from being able to use it. Are you sure that your idea doesn't use anyone else's ideas? Are you sure that it is truly original? No one has ever thought of anything like it? You aren't standing on the shoulders of anyone who came before you? Even if that is true, what exactly do you hope to accomplish by patenting it? Do you have the money to fight a prolonged legal battle against an infringer? Do you really think it is productive to spend all that effort in court instead of actually improving your software product? Is your idea truly so unique that your competitor cannot come up with an equally good way to accomplish the same thing? Finally, how are you going to know that someone copies your idea? Maybe they just came up with a similar idea on their own. You also may want to ask yourself whether your idea would still be possible if nearly every idea in the problem domain had already been patented?
Those are the exceptions. Not the rule. Most patents fail the obviousness test. And many fail the prior art test as well. Not only are they obvious, but they are not even original. I had one aspect of a product that I designed patented and it was utterly ridiculous. I was sure that the patent would be rejected, but it wasn't. There may not have been any prior art because it was so damn obvious. So in my case, the inventor (me) doesn't think that his invention is worthy of a patent because it fails the obviousness test and because it is more of an idea than an implementation, but the uspto disagrees. I really think you would have to work to find something that the uspto would not patent. I guess you can't blame them. That's how they make money. But the system is very broken.
You know, criminal cases have a backlog in the courts, too. Obviously, the way to fix this is to declare assault and battery no longer a crime.
You picked a bad example. How about legalizing victimless crimes, like drug possession? Russia just did something similar. They didn't legalize drugs per se, but instead of imprisoning drug users they just fine them each time they are caught with them. Even small time drug dealers are just fined. If we were to do something similar our overcrowded jails would be half empty.
If you aren't bothering to defend your original idea (give the man a cookie!) then what was the point of applying for the protection in the first place? Just in case someone else stumbled onto the same obvious idea? Sorry, but I do think your idea was pretty obvious. Actually implementing it would certainly represent progress, but trying to prevent others from doing so? For some reason your company hasn't done that. What if patents were like trademarks, where you lose them if you don't defend them?
Give an example of an idea that you could sell. Patents were never intended to protect your ideas. And if you feel that your ideas actually need some kind of protection, then I am willing to bet you are not very intelligent yourself. Intelligent people don't think like that. They know that truly original ideas are basically fiction. Let me sell you an idea: software patents are so ridiculous that only a complete idiot could have thought up that particular idea. How do you like them apples?
I work in a profession that, when functioning correctly, fosters innovation. I have no qualms about it.
You are in it because it pays well. Just like every other lawyer. Don't pretend that you have principles. And it doesn't foster innovation. It stifles it. That's why so many of us are against patents. The system only protects large corporations from smaller companies without large patent portfolios to trade. I wonder if there has ever been a single inventor whose invention has been protected by getting a patent. Maybe there have been some cases, but nowadays it almost never happens. I would never bother to file for patent protection. If a large company wants to copy my product there is nothing that I can do about it. What am I going to do? Sue them? Hahahahaha! And what if the company is in China? No. Patents are really only useful to large corporations for defensive use, so that they can get away with infringing patents by threatening to sue the other company for their patent violations. They are also useful to patent trolls like, say, Rambus. But to an actual inventor? Useless.
Are you saying software simply can't be inventive? That you can't possibly think of something in software that anyone else couldn't have thought of, even given the exact same problem set?
Software is just a series of instructions. So, no, it can't be "inventive". And even if I did think of something that no one had ever thought of before (although highly unlikely), I shouldn't be able to patent it. The patent system was not intended to protect original ideas. I did successfully patent the idea of doing cube roots on a computer though. And then proceeded to get a patent on square roots on the internet. This was after my infamous one click patent. The whole patent system is broken and, as a patent attorney, it sounds like you are part of the problem.
What will they make IV kits out of? Or rubber seals for syringes? What about tires for road vehicles. Will we make them out of wood or metal? Petroleum based long chain polymers are one of the things that make the modern world modern.
Burning coal for electricity produces an order of magnitude [doe.gov] more CO2 than oil does. Coal isn't going to run out anytime soon.
But coal will run out eventually. IIRC estimates are that coal will be too expensive due to a decreased supply in something like 50 years. That is not nearly enough time to turn the Earth into Venus. Of course if my livelihood depended on government grant money for research into the approaching armageddon of Global Warming I'm sure I would think differently so as not to have to get a job working at McDonalds or something.
I didn't realize that coal produced so much more CO2. If that's the case then switching to electric cars might actually lead to more CO2. Almost 50% of US electricity comes from coal. Only 1% comes from oil. More CO2 may actually be a good thing for the Peak Fossil Fuel problem. The more CO2 we have the faster our trees will grow. The faster our trees will grow the more renewable energy we can get from tree farms (aka forests).
For a longer-term fix we could try putting some serious money behind fusion research. I'm certain that ITER, and subsequently DEMO, could be operational a bit faster if they had three times the budget.
At the current amount we spend on fusion research a practical fusion reactor will always be 10 years away. If we triple the funding then it would always be 3.3 years away. If we increase the funding by 10 times then it will always remain only one year away. So I guess it makes sense.
If coal becomes a limited supply they can always burn oil.
Oil is a lot more scarce than coal at the moment. After oil becomes too expensive for anything but airplanes we will probably still have another 20 years of coal supply.
Electric cars currently do not remove the requirement to burn oil.
Only one percent of electricity in the US is from oil. 48% is from coal, 21% is from natural gas, 20% is from nuclear, 6% is from hydroelectric, 1% is from wind power, and 1% is from burning waste wood and garbage. The states with the most expensive electricity use mostly natural gas and/or nuclear. The states with the cheapest electricity use coal and/or hydroelectric.
Taxes are never earmarked like that. The taxation system just isn't set up to do that. Try again. BTW, with such high petrol prices, do Europeans use more electric vehicles? I would imagine that they might drive less. Last night I drove 52 miles (round trip) just to get a pizza. It took me 1 hour and 20 minutes and used about 2 gallons of petrol, which added about $5 to the cost of said pizza. If petrol prices were much higher I wouldn't have been able to make that trip. That's why I want to buy a Nissan Leaf.
We already have fuel taxes. That is not the answer. If oil truly is being subsidized then we should stop it immediately. Otherwise, we should try to transition to nuclear power as a medium term solution and spend some money on scientific research to come up with long term (100+ year) solutions. More taxes are never going to automagically solve any problems. Some degree of energy subsidies toward non-fossil fuel alternative energy might be worthwhile however. The reasoning for this is that the free market tends to only adjust for current conditions. If Peak Oil happens too abruptly, faster than we can build nuclear (and maybe some solar and hydro where feasible) power plants, then we will be in big trouble. We know that Peak Oil is going to happen. We just don't know when. So it may make sense to be a bit more prepared for it by subsidizing the alternatives. Needless to say, we shouldn't be building any more oil burning generators. All new non-nuclear power stations should be coal or natural gas. Although coal is cheaper.
The only real, long term solution is using renewable energy.
Renewable? Can you give an example? Are you talking about wood?
Being a global warming denier is similar to being a free thinker. Not so long ago being an atheist/agnostic could get you burned at the stake. Global Warming as Catastrophe is not science. It is religion. Which is why you call us "deniers". Like atheists are deniers of god. When you make an assertion it requires evidence and the burden of coming up with that evidence is on those who are making the assertion. I do find the evidence that CO2 is slightly increasing over time to be convincing (regardless of what is causing it), and I agree that a slightly higher percentage of CO2 tends to lead to slightly higher atmospheric temperatures. As for the rest you have to be a true believer. I'm a skeptic. I don't believe in Global Warming (as a bad thing) for the same reason that I don't believe in a God. There is insufficient evidence to support the belief. Global Warming may or may not happen, and if it does happen it may be a good thing. I would view a cooling as much more dangerous. Luckily Global Cooling (The Next Ice Age!) is no longer the current fad. So it's not my responsibility to worry about that anymore, as I had to as a child when it was on all the magazine covers in the 70s. I figured by 2010 kids would be building snowmen in the summer.
Because nobody makes an extension cord THAT long
That made my think of trolley cars. Some kind of car-train hybrid. I wonder if we could wire up our roads or at least our major highways with overhead high voltage lines made to power vehicles equipped with some kind of wire arm in order to either switch off the battery power or charge the batteries while you drive. Or maybe we could build a kind of "third rail" recessed into the road where vehicles could stick in some kind of wire. I wonder if there is some reason that we could not power our cars the same way we power many trains. Of course maglev monorails on every highway would be nice if we had cars that could adapt to them. This would be a beautiful system and we wouldn't need to rely on new battery technology. It would also have a nice feeling of "living in the future". Like the glass domed cities and flying cars that people in the 50s thought we would have by now.
Right, and coal won't running out until long after global warming has done its thing.
Citations please. Also, what is this "thing" you speak of? Do global warming theories take peak oil/coal into account? We don't have to run out of coal. Coal just has to become sufficiently expensive that coal plants cost more than nuclear plants. Right now coal is one of the cheapest sources of electricity. Only hydroelectric can compete.
Actually gasoline was something like 94 cents a gallon when I first started driving in 1986. I don't remember what it was in the 70s. My father told me that he can remember when gasoline was like 10 cents a gallon. Keep in mind that we have something like a 50 cent per gallon fuel tax now. We didn't have that in the 80s. Without the tax gas would be about $2.00 per gallon right now. So the (lowest) price has doubled since the late 80s.
Because you need something that can produce a couple of hundred horsepower, more or less continuously, and with a minimal "recharge" time.
This. This may be the core problem with Peak Oil. Whether or not we will have sufficiently good electric vehicle technology to make practical electric or fuel cell powered tractors. If not, and the cost of fuel is $400/gallon, I think we can expect the price of food to rise quite a bit. Will only the rich be able to afford to eat at all? I guess we could always just become cannibals. There seem to be no shortage of humans to go around. Pass the Long Pig.
There will be much more serious problems to deal with before we get there.
For instance?
According to the USDOE it should currently be profitable to make biodiesel from algae grown in the desert with seawater and optionally recapturing CO2 from coal or oil plants.
Wow. Talk about speculative. Enough biodiesel to power every motor vehicle on the planet? Hope we have a lot of desert land. We are going to need it. Let's wait until they prove that this works in practice before we start relying on it. It sounds to me that hydrogen production powered by nuclear generated electricity to power fuel cell vehicles is a lot more practical for land vehicles and maybe even some boats.
Probably a lot of people will go back to an earlier style of life where they don't heat the whole house.
Agreed. But I'm not sure that will really be necessary if we can build nuclear power plants fast enough. There may be some lag, but eventually electricity should be no more expensive than it is now in nuclear powered states or countries. I don't think we are talking much more than 20 cents per kilowatt hour. Probably a bit less. Especially if we could reduce some of the regulatory costs involved etc. Anyone who doesn't have 20+ acre wooded lots will be running on electric heat. Having your own combustion heat source will be thought of as an old fashioned extravagance like gas lanterns or something.
What do you suggest I feed my animals with?
If we are talking about cows or horses or goats etc the answer would be grass. I'm afraid you will have to allow them to graze just as nature intended. Not too sure about pigs. The price of meat will definitely go up. Even the price of fish will get higher because electric or fuel cell powered boats are rather impractical due to range-energy density issues.
What do you suggest I heat my house with?
When our fossil fuels run down the only practical option will be electric heat via nuclear power plants. Fossil fuels and wood will just be too expensive. Wood in general is a renewable resource, but it is not likely to be renewable fast enough to heat everyone's houses in the winter. In your case 20 acres of fast growth trees may be enough to sustain you, but most people don't have 20 acre lots. Maybe when nearly every power plant is a nuclear power plant a lot of the costs will be reduced. We will just have to live with the risks. There won't be a lot of choice.
The theory itself predicts a gradual rise in price. Think of a bell curve.
I agree that Peak Oil if and when it happens will be a gradual process. In fact, I believe that is what the theory itself states. Have you actually read the the theory itself? It sounds a bit like you haven't. Because you seem to be missing the point. The biggest problem as I see it comes down to energy density. We don't consider it practical to run land vehicles with nuclear power. So that leaves us with our very limited battery and fuel cell technology, which will have to scale up to massive levels to be used worldwide in every vehicle.
When petroleum sources become too expensive to use there are going to be some very major problems we have to deal with. Plastic is made from oil. Imagine a world where plastic is 100 times more expensive than it is now. Or 1000 times more expensive. And all of our land vehicles will have to be battery (or fuel cell) powered. This means that the range of land vehicles will be very short. No doubt petrol stations will also have high amperage, high voltage, electrical pumps and/or hydrogen pumps, but shipping freight via trucking will become relatively impractical. We may be able to substitute nuclear powered trains to some extent, but we will still need trucks to transport the cargo from the trains. Traveling by air will again only be for the rich. The cost of many, many items, such as food, will raise by orders of magnitude. Needless to say the cost of living in a cold climate will rise astronomically. The price of heating oil and natural gas and coal and even wood will all rise to many, many times the current price. Probably everyone will be using electric heat powered by nuclear plants, which is not cheap. For the rich, it won't be too much of a problem. It is the poor that will suffer. The most serious problem even for the rich will be when we finally start running low on uranium fuel, which is also a finite resource. Peak oil, if and when it happens will massively change the way we live our lives. Whether there truly are massive die offs of the human population is uncertain, but it is within the realm of possibility if we can no longer produce food cheaply enough to feed the world.