I had a partner who once said to me when times were difficult:“Mike, we need to get ready to be lucky.” These days, it’s humanity that needs to get ready.

We are facing three major global problems concurrently. The most imminent problem is the debt crisis, especially as it affects sovereign nations’ default, the future of the euro, and the possibility of Europe and North America slipping into a lengthy recession.

Debt over the years has simply not been employed where it is productive. Productive borrowing acquires assets whose performance produces returns that have a margin of profit after the debt coverage. But governments have tended not to borrow this way, nor have consumers—hence, the situation we find ourselves in today.

The other two problems are “physical” in nature and are being expressed economically and socially. In the near term, we have “peak oil,” which is showing up as higher energy prices (recognizing that the recent fall in oil prices is due to reduced demand, not increased supply).

Over the past 100 years or so, the almost unbelievable improvement in standards of living has come about mainly because of very easy access to very cheap energy. Energy returned on energy invested (ERoEI) measures how much it costs to get access to energy. This ratio, whose decline is the economic symptom of peak oil, is showing signs of severe negative changes to come, even within the next decade.

One of the reasons the world has prospered is that we never paid the true cost of this cheap energy. There is no carbon recycling fee— no tipping fee like there is at the local garbage dump. Unfortunately, there is a cost to filling our common atmosphere with carbon, and that is our third major problem: longer-term climate change, with its more gradual but no less important impacts.

All three of the problems I have just described are evidence of long-term, deep-seated issues that need to get resolved quite fast. Can we come to grips with any one of them? Or do we need to address them all at once? And is there any realistic pathway that involves the private sector?