You don't have to be a scientist, electro physicist, bio-engineer, eco-geologist , doomsday conspiracy theorist, or have a PHD in anything 'institutional' to understand one of the most absolute futures for humanity. In fact, any person who cares deeply for themselves and their children should care about peak oil and it's consequences.
What is peak oil?
Peak Oil is the point in the near future when Global Oil Demand, Extraction and Production will out-pace Global Oil Supplies, after which the rate of production will enter terminal decline.
Terminal decline
Now that does not sound so bad or even alarming on the surface when you just read it, but when you really sit down and think about it, it is a pretty shocking sentiment for our civilization and the world as we know it. Oil is the sun's energy that the Earth spent 100 million years collecting and converting into this so-called 'black gold,' but this is its strength and its weakness. Oil is by all definitions; a finite resource that we as a population have been thoroughly encouraged to believe is infinite. Since we first discovered oil in the late 1800s, scientists calculated that the Earth contained about two trillion barrels of oil in all the world's reserves, oceans, and continents. That sure sounds like a lot, right?
Here is the kicker
Globally, we have now used right around half of it, and the rate at which we continue to suck it up from the ground is increasing at dramatic rates as our population and it's unrelenting needs explode around the globe. Almost everything we now rely on to fuel our obsessive, compulsive desires to consume relies on oil. Our labor and manufacturing, transport, technology, fuel, politics, money and the global war machine all rely on this quick, cheap conversion of natural resource into energy. But there is inevitably a time when the demand for this energy will surpass the planet's capacity to supply the need. When this happens, and it will, it will certainly cause a chaotic shift in everything we have come to believe is normal. There is a really good reason it's called black gold; it's the discovery that made many men rich and evil.
The Problem
Herein lies the problem with having a positive outlook about Peak Oil. Global energy supplies used by average citizens of towns and cities, small and large, are generally provided by local or state municipalities, federal governments, or giant "private" corporations that make billions of dollars every year. They are the ones that need to relinquish financial control over the supply of oil, and invest much of those future, potential profits into renewable resources RIGHT NOW... but they won't. History will show us that at that point, these governments and corporations will enforce the use of the little supply of oil left in order to squeeze out maximum profits, rather than invest those profits right now in renewable sources. It will take a massive global collaboration at unfathomable expense to curve this crisis and supply 100 percent of the world's energy needs with clean, renewable resources. If there were enough investment in the technology to capture and produce that energy, you wouldn't be reading this right now. Ultimately, the solution is complete reliance on renewable resources that create no toxic byproducts.
