Has oil production peaked?
Sunday, June 19, 2005
John C. Kuehner
Plain Dealer Reporter
The post-peak oil world will look a lot like the bleak 1970s. But much worse.
A recession will grip the globe because the price of oil, and everything tied to it, will skyrocket.
Starvation will abound because oil-based fertilizers we've grown to depend on will be in short supply. Energy wars could erupt to control the remaining oil fields.
Sleek, small, fuel-efficient cars will rule the road. Central cities will thrive and suburbs will gradually wither and die because the cheap oil that made their existence possible will be gone.
We'll go back to this Mad Maxlike future once oil production peaks and starts to decline, which could be this year.
"For any American under 65, this will be tough to swallow," said Julian Darley, director of the Post Carbon Institute, a think tank based in Vancouver, British Columbia, that explores how the world will operate without oil.
"We will go backwards," he said. "We will have to sacrifice."
The stark future that Darley and others envision is based on a belief that global oil production will peak and rapidly decline, sending the world spinning down an economic sinkhole.
"I think peak oil is every bit as important as the threat of thermonuclear war," said Matthew Simmons, head of Simmons & Co. International of Houston, an energy investment-banking firm.
Simmons compares today's lackadaisical approach to the coming world oil crisis to Europe as it stood on the brink of World War II in 1938.
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