Peak Oil For Dummies
Master Domino Are Resource Wars Coming? What Are the Experts Saying? Science Can Save Us Right? How Much is Left?
The consequences (if true) would be unimaginable. Permanent fuel shortages would tip the world into a generations-long economic depression. Millions would lose their jobs as industry implodes. Farm tractors would be idled for lack of fuel, triggering massive famines. Energy wars would flare. And car-less suburbanites would trudge to their nearest big-box stores--not to buy Chinese-made clothing transported cheaply across the globe, but to scavenge glass and copper wire from abandoned buildings.
I continue to believe that the American consumer is the weak link in the global daisy chain. The combination of rising long-term interest rates and higher oil prices puts an unmistakable squeeze on discretionary income--the last thing overly indebted, savings-short US consumers need.
The world has never faced a problem like peak oil. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary.
If the peak comes and we can't get our act together fast enough to make up for it, you will end up with people all over the world burning coal as fast as they can just for the space heating and primitive industry. Such a large scale switch to coal could produce global warming so severe that life on planet Earth would cease to exist.
The American people are going to pay a terrible price for not having had an energy strategy.
Globalization makes it impossible for modern societies to collapse in isolation. Any society in turmoil today, no matter how remote, can cause problems for prosperous societies on other continents.
The medical profession must eventually be forced to consider whether in an age of fuel scarcity it will be possible to maintain at their present level hospital procedures consuming large quantities of energy.
Petroleum impacts medical care at every level. Advanced technology is worthless without the energy to run it.
The Nation must start now to respond to peaking global oil production to offset adverse economic and national security impacts.
Nevertheless, even with greater efficiency, the total amount of energy used by 2030 will have increased by almost two-thirds.
I fear we're going to be at war for decades, not years...  Ultimately we will win it, but one major component of that war is oil. -James Woolsey