Peak Oil’s Effects on Recreation and Leisure

The rise in oil prices and the inevitable event of global oil production peak will affect the recreation and leisure services field severely. Travel and tourism will be devastated to a point that will reflect the era of railroads, steamboats, and canals. Retail and the recreation and leisure services industries will have to become much more locally based. Oil is necessary to keep these industries profitable and available. If there is no more oil left, or more realistically, if the oil that is left is too expensive to retrieve, these industries will not be able to function as they have been for the past century. Alternative energies may help to a certain degree, but nothing will be able to replace the energy cheap oil has provided the world for the past century.

The global oil production peak is the point at which the production of oil has reached its maximum and starts to fall. Defined by James Howard Kunstler, an advocate of alternative energies and commentator on fossil fuel issues,