What does climate change and peak oil mean to us?

Basically just about everything we do in our live today revolves around the cheap and abundant availability of oil, gas and coal based energy.

Coal is used for electricity generation. Oil is used for cars, trucks, planes and other commuting/goods transport/tourism; as a basis for many of the things we consume especially plastics; and significantly as a source of fertilizers.

Burning coal, gas and oil all produces CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

Peak oil theory says we're running out of cheap oil - this is certainly a real issue today in Australia and around the rest of the world.

Meanwhile if we are to avoid the dangers of climate change we need to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted.

So in short the answer to the question is that both climate change and peak oil require us to change the basis of the current way of life, away from emitting a lot of green house gases, to emitting little. This is known as developing a "low emissions economy".