Australians are in two minds today. Many of us celebrate the economic boom that has generated new levels of prosperity, and pushed unemployment and want to the margins of consciousness. And yet growing numbers of Australians are increasingly disturbed by two comets that seem to be streaking across and spoiling the bright skies of prosperity - climate change and oil scarcity. One fiery trail reports a climate cooked and despoiled by human greed. The other marks the disappearing trail of a vital resource, the energy that propelled us to greatness, and yet ultimately became our downfall. Both entwine menacingly above us: one glowering with rising strength, the other fading and failing away. The heavens aroused and inflamed are an awful force. Their anger shakes the groundwork of everyday life: the jobs, the holidays, the hobbies that fill our days. The very earth upon which we stand seems to be moving under our feet; things - solid things - around us seem to be swaying. Our wonderful climate - the envy of the world - seems to be turning on us. Terra Australis is becoming Terror Australis, a blast furnace of drought, heat and capricious tempests. The nation is gripped by concern about scarcity. Not of good domestic help, Chilean wine or smart European ovens. It’s water, the fundamental means of existence that we are running out of. In April 2007, then Prime Minister John Howard intoned gravely that the nation's food bowl, the Murray-Darling Basin, might soon fail. There was talk of the need to import food. Even in cities, traditionally immune to drought, years of prolonged water shortage showed in the greying, lifeless gardens of suburbia, where there lurked a quiet, deepening gloom about the deaths of things once cherished and nurtured. Meanwhile oil, the lifeblood of our economy and everyday lives, seems to be slipping away. It’s harder, more expensive, to keep a grip on lifestyles based on cheap petrol and unrestrained mobility. ‘Pain at the pump’ is another little unfolding agony in everyday life. Daily we hear more about ‘peak oil’: a looming moment when the world's oil reserves will start to decline. The idea has been about for a while, but has been dismissed by governments and industry as the baseless rantings of survivalists, doomsayers and eccentric dons. Not so anymore.