The Peak Oil Crisis: What of 2009?

Our wish has been granted for we are indeed living in interesting times. The world’s economy is either collapsing or is putting on a very good imitation of doing so.

Production of cheap, abundant fossil fuels is peaking and will soon be withering away, yet gasoline for our cars has almost never been inflation-adjusted cheaper. Around the world, numerous sovereign governments are close to becoming dysfunctional — likely with very bad consequences. We are pumping so much of the wrong kinds of gases into the atmosphere that the poles are melting, the seas are rising, the land is drying out and some day soon this planet is going to be very tough to live on. On top of all this, the world seems to be acquiring a fair number of people who are convinced that only they understand God properly and that the rest of us deserve to be done in. The only good news is that, so far as we know, there are no large meteors heading towards earth that would render the foregoing problems irrelevant.


The purpose of reciting a list of woes is to remind ourselves that we are living on one big interrelated, interconnected earth. Attempting to solve one problem will either mitigate or perhaps exacerbate the others for nothing much remains static these days. Economic growth has come to a halt in most countries and even China’s meteoric growth is subsiding towards half what it was a couple of years ago.

How long this will last is anybody’s guess. While Wall Street babbles on about rebounds in six or maybe nine months, others are convinced that the damage done to the world’s financial systems in recent years is so great that, despite the trillions in bailouts and stimuli, there is no hope for recovery in the foreseeable future. Those of us who worry about such things are concerned that low oil prices have stifled new investment to such an extent that in a few years the oil industry will find it impossible to stem declining production from natural depletion.

Falls Church News-Press