The Peak Oil Crisis: The Transition

April 03 2008 - While waiting for the price of gasoline to get so high that we can’t afford to drive anymore, there is still some time to ponder just how the great paradigm shift of the 21st century is going to work out.
What will life be like 40 or 50 years from now? How many of the 6.6 billion of us will still be around? Will lifestyles be an all-electric version of the 20th Century or will inability to recover from rapidly falling supplies of fossil fuels leave us with qualitatively different lifestyles?

Among the handful of people that a) know we are on the verge of a very big problem, and b) ponder about it in print or on the internet, there are a wide range of opinions as to what the future will be like. Opinions run from the “doomers” who are convinced that only a few of the 300 million Americans and 6.3 billion foreigners are going to survive by moving to small self-sufficient rural communities and hunkering down through the anarchy. At the other end of the scale are those who are convinced that as soon as the Congress drops all this environmental nonsense and gives the oil companies unrestricted access to those billions of barrels of oil just off the coast, we will be set for centuries. More >>>