I am in some middle camp on peak oil. Yes, I think it will be serious, especially with agriculture. Millions of people will starve. Shoot, they're starving now. It will get much worse.
On the other hand, I don't think humans will be extinct in 30 years as some have proposed.
On the third hand, I don't think natural gas will save the day. The U.S. is already a net importer of nat gas, mostly from canada. Canada's reserves have been dropping steadily, if not rapidly. Here's a non-hyperbolic analysis;
Peak Natural Gas
Ten minutes of reading on a google or bing search for peak natural gas should convince anyone that "just" switching to nat gas is not "THE" answer.
Yes, I have seen oil wells where they are burning off natural gas. I used to work in the oil field in the 80's. The reason they do it is that it is uneconomical to recover the gas at that well. Pipeline is too far away, quality isn't good enough, whatever.
That's the whole point of peak oil, it's not that we run out of oil, it's that we run out of cheap/easy/high quality oil. Ditto natural gas. If it costs more, in energy, to build a pipeline out to that isolated well, you CAN'T make any use of the natural gas.
Without gigantic amounts of conservation, peak energy will be bad for most humans.
HTH,
troy