Peak oil: two words to worry about

The crisis would be so severe, we wouldn’t be able to run our tractors, heat our homes or drive our cars.

As if you don’t have enough to worry about, add two more words to your list: peak oil.

Forget climate change -peak oil is the biggest problem on the human horizon according to some. Bullcrap, say others.

The idea is actually hard to explain, which may be why many have never heard of it. But if the peak oil theory is true, it will affect us all drastically, so it’s worth a shot:

Technically, there is lots of oil left in the world. We’re often told the supply could last 40 or 50 years. But peak oil is the exact point at which oil production peaks. The idea is you don’t need to run out of oil to get into trouble. You just have to reach the “peak,” the point where you’ve passed maximum output and start to run out. At that point, oil becomes finite and something big happens -the price surges. That jump would be so violent and unavoidable, say some, that the global economy would simply run out of affordable gas and, in a worst-case scenario, would collapse. The crisis would be so severe, we wouldn’t be able to run tractors, heat our homes or, naturally, drive our cars. Soon we’d be living like 17th-century pioneers in the shell of our former gas-driven civilization.

The peak may be imminent. Some predict it will happen when the global economic machine revs up in this recovery. Take it from Matt Savinar, author of doom site Life After The Oil Crash. “Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon,” he writes. “This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult. … Rather, it is the scientific conclusion of the best paid, most widely respected geologists, physicists, bankers and investors in the world.”

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/Peak+words+worry+about/3448643/story.html#ixzz0xnqTyNWW