Peak Oil

Given President Bush's proposed new energy policy, announced today, this would be an opportune time to blog about Peak Oil, a post that I've been mentally composing (and revising) for several weeks now.

Unfortunately, that's gonna have to wait until I'm not too tired to think straight (see below.) The "Peak Oil" link above is a very long but unusually lucid and well-written Wikipedia article; please put it on your "to-read" list immediately, gentle readers.

For a somewhat shrill and alarmist (but probably essentially accurate) take on the issue, read James Howard Kunstler's article "The Long Emergency" in a recent issue of Rolling Stone:

It has been very hard for Americans -- lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring -- to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency.

Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life -- not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense -- you name it.

The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don't have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.

The article is exceprted from a book, called The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century, that just went on my Amazon order list.