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It is increasingly difficult to dismiss the sense that economic and social systems we’ve come to regard as “normal,” locally and globally, are strained to the limit and breaking down. Crude oil nudging $112 a barrel send motor fuel prices to record highs. People in Haiti rioting and booting their prime minister in protest and frustration over skyrocketing food prices. People killed in food riots in West Africa. These seemingly disconnected phenomena are part and parcel of a perfect storm of converging factors including energy shortages, climate change, and a third-world population explosion that will oblige us to redefine “normal.”

We are arguably already in what author and activist James Howard Kunstler dubbed in is 2006 book of the same title, The Long Emergency.


I don’t always agree with Kunstler – 10 years ago he was profoundly mistaken about the impact of the Y2K bug, while I predicted by mid-1999 that it would be a transitory hiccup – but I think he’s on to something with projected consequences of peak oil.

If you think high fuel prices of the past several months are a temporary economic blip and anticipate return to relatively cheaper oil prices of quite recent memory, you’re likely out of luck. The U.S. Energy Information Administration says conventional world oil production peaked in May 2005, and the peak in all oil (including non-conventional sources like tarsands) is estimated to come in 2010.

Actually, oil production per capita peaked in the 1970s at about 5.26 barrels per year and is now 4.73 barrels per year. In the meantime, China’s oil consumption has grown by 8 per cent annually since 2002, doubling from 1996-2006, and India’s oil imports are projected to more than triple from 2005 levels by 2020, while at least nine of the world’s 21 largest oilfields are in decline.

Even those raw statistics are somewhat optimistic, since the half of nominal reserves remaining are much more difficult and costly to extract and of poorer quality than the easy half were. A substantial proportion will never be pumped, and worldwide discovery of new oil has declined to insignificant levels.

Telegraph-Journal