Israel: Tapped out

What will life look like 10 years from now? Most people work on the assumption that it will resemble life today, more or less. Yaron Hochman, on the other hand, sees things differently.

“In another 10 years, mankind will be busy with one main issue – finding ways of making do without oil, but continuing to do most of the things we do today,” he says. “People are constantly asking when the world oil supply will run out, but that is not a relevant question. The question is, at what point will world production rates begin to decline? That moment will arrive very soon. We received a gift of a huge energy reservoir, but soon we will have to figure out how to get along without it.”


Hochman, 26, from Jerusalem, studied biology at university, but now he works in gardening. The changing point occured three years ago, when he understood how extreme the changes in our lives would be. “The climbing global price of oil is neither temporary nor coincidental,” he writes on his blog, peakoil.org.il, the only blog in Hebrew devoted to the end of the oil era. “The world is about to face a historic event, unparalleled in its scope and its implications for the human species … We are now in the twilight of the modern era.”

Hochman says that these insights led him to prepare a “Plan B” for his life. “When I started to read about the decreasing oil resources, this really shook me. This was a moment of awakening,” he says. “As soon as you grasp the idea that oil is being exhausted, every day you find new aspects of the change that is about to take place. Oil is the oxygen of our civilization. All the systems around us are almost entirely based on it. We all have become addicted to a lifestyle based on a resource that is being exhausted. It is better not to wait for this drug to run out, and to try to wean ourselves beforehand. Whatever we do will make life easier.”

Haaretz