Looking Back to the Peak: A Letter from the Future

The following is a letter written in 2024 to a writer seeking information on the unfolding energy crisis from a newly appointed U. S. member of the hastily formed International Committee on the Energy Emergency.

Dear Robert,

Your question about how the world reached such a crisis in energy is both easy and difficult to answer. The easy answer is that we have been in an energy emergency for more than a decade without even realizing it. We simply mislabeled it as solely an economic problem. The more difficult answer must trace the events of the last 20 years in order to provide the background you will need to understand our current predicament. To that end I decided to put my thoughts into writing since the explanation is a fairly lengthy one.
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