Then there’s the jatropha tree. It grows in arid zones and in Australia is regarded as a weed. Its nut yields an oil that can be produced for about $US3.60 a gallon (about 60 cents more than ordinary diesel). The residue can be used to feed cattle, says Ron, and he has put some of his own money into schemes now flourishing in Mali, Tanzania, India, Thailand and South Africa. The key to success will be quality control in refining.

Lord Oxburgh, like Tim Jones, is keen on oil from corpses. Here is how Brad Lernley of Cosmos magazine reported this story:

It is the worst stuff in the world. Eighteen tonnes of turkey offal-rotting heads, gnarled feet, slimy intestines and lungs swollen with putrid gases-slides down a dump truck into a 24-metre-long hopper with a sickening glorp. The smell is worse than the sight: an assertive mélange of midsummer corpse with fried-liver overtones and a distinct faecal note.

But two hours later, sterile as you please, an oil truck pulls up behind this Thermal Conversion Process plant in the small American Midwest town of Carthage, Missouri, and the driver attaches a hose from a nearby stationary tank to the truck’s intake valve. One hundred and fifty barrels of oil (23,800 L), worth $US12,300, gushes into the truck’s tank, and off it goes to an oil company that will blend it with heavier fossil-fuel oil to upgrade the stock.

The real challenge, though, it seems to me, will be social. Stunning new machines exist for us to use as trains, planes or road vehicles, but in the main, we misuse them. Concorde has gone, super trains are exotic wonders, and Arnie’s Tesla car could legally use only one-tenth of its capacity on Australia ’s roads.

Imagine, instead, a transport system in which the approach of your bus would be signalled with a ping on your mobile phone and you could stroll to the bus stop knowing the wait would be barely a minute (this technology is ready). Imagine forsaking your car (converting the garage into a romper room or workshop) and having a vehicle-a carlet-only when you really needed it. As private cars already cost more than the taxi equivalent of trips taken, you would also save heaps. Imagine taking trains from the centre of town and moving at 300-350 kph to your destination, getting off just a five-minute walk from where you want to be. Imagine making a plane trip special again, instead of a long-distance endurance test.

Imagine biking or walking (running) to where you want to be, without playing dodgems with killer traffic. And imagine converting your rushed attendance at the gym into a health-giving routine, in which your legs don’t engage with a treadmill going nowhere but take you where you want to be. Imagine that your exercise in exasperation, in going shopping at the supermarket beyond the ring road with three apoplectic kids, is turned into an Internet search for bargains followed by delivery right to your door by an electric go-cart. Imagine travelling only when you really want to. All the time with a smug grin on your face from your appreciation that you’re not wrecking the neighbourhood.

And that future could be ours. Not in 2027, or 2037- but tomorrow!

The Hunches of Nostradamus

2008 Cost of petrol rises from a low point of $0.85 to a high of $2.35 in Australia. Some 56 per cent of people say they would rather die than not drive their cars. Some do.

2009 Singapore and London announce electronic pricing for all roads.

2010 Traffic jams in Beijing and Thailand last four days. Twenty-seven babies born in cars.

2011 Proportion of Sydney residents commuting by car goes up from 72 per cent to 79 per cent. Pedestrian arrested in Canberra.

2012 Petrol reaches $3.20 a litre. Twenty-four per cent of Saudi Arabians are billionaires.

2013 In Sydney and Melbourne 347 car drivers die of starvation.

2014 Japanese launch railway network with bullet trains travelling at 670 kph.

2015 Richard Branson offers trips to the moon for $3.5 million. The first to go find a Starbucks in the Sea of Tranquillity.

2016 Perth removes all cars from within city boundaries. Citizens discover legs.

2017 In Beijing pollution causes fall in life expectancy to 29 years.

2018 Oil Wars break out. Sydney executives no longer allowed free car as part of salary package. Most break down and cry.

2019 Texans accept declared state of emergency and pledge to limit each family to only three 4WDs.

2020 Australian PM rides bike to work. Gets there twenty minutes early.

2024 Government finally removes tax concessions on 4WD purchases.

Vienna is one of my favourite cities. I grew up there. It is small, elegant and, like the old Sydney suburb of Balmain, shows organic growth-old parts remain and flourish amid the new. Green vistas are fresh alongside the venerable buildings. Private mansions mix with terraces and office blocks; the history is visible, and you can see how the future will be able to mesh into the spaces available.

Harry Seidler used to make much of this. He would show pictures of the heart of Vienna, near the great St Stephen’s Cathedral, where ancient structures stand in harmonious juxtaposition with spanking fresh shining ones. The mix of old and new is possible, he insisted;

Future Perfect you don’t need to quarantine the historic. (Federation Square in Melbourne does this superbly.) Nor does modern housing require a scorched-earth policy, a start from ground zero.

How many times have you looked down from a plane and seen fresh clover-shaped scars where new roads outline the shapes of instant suburbs being prepared, as if homes are about to land intact from the sky, delivered by ET? Kit towns. When you walk through them after they are finished, they seem strangely dehumanised and lonely places.

The 1960s and ‘70s were notorious for this kind of development. It was as if any kind of housing would do-a legacy from the Second World War, when shelter at all costs was required. In the 21st century we face greater simultaneous challenges: vast populations, water shortages, killer pollution and climate change. This year, according to the United Nations, more people will live in cities than in countryside: three billion of us squashed into barely 2 per cent of the earth’s surface.

One of the paradoxes of this movement of the poor in search of food and work is that the conurbations have spread over the best agricultural land. Towns were established long ago next to fertile fields and good water; now concrete has covered them in the quest for lebensraum. Vast Dickensian shantytowns and slums ring the great cities of South America, Asia and Africa. What answers has science got to this historic challenge? Maybe Vienna has a few. That is where the UN Population Division has offices, on the city’s outskirts by a pine forest, housed in a modernised palace. That is where, in 1996, their head demographer assured me that the world population will grow by 33 per cent, to nine billion, but then plateau and stabilise by about 2060.

So, how to combine the old with the new, as symbolised by those rustic UN offices and by Vienna itself? New Scientist magazine summed up the answer this way in an editorial in June 2006: ‘Greens are prone to idealising the past. They instinctively look back to a pre-industrial pastoral idyll, or to the age of hunter-gatherers living in harmony with their environment. In this view, urbanisation and the rise of the mega-city are harbingers of doom. City dwellers, after all, make up only half of the world’s population but consume three quarters of the resources and generate three quarters of its pollution.’ The magazine notes all the urban experiments from China to Australia, and counsels: ‘This is the challenge environmentalists should embrace. The good news is that cities, far from being environmental basket cases, are uniquely well-equipped for the task.’