The current shortage of gasoline may not be temporary. It very likely is an 
indication that we are close to the point in history when the ability of the 
earth to provide us with oil has reached a peak, after which the rate of oil 
production, usually measured in millions of barrels of oil per day, must go into 
permanent decline. This event, known as "Peak Oil" will change every aspect of 
our economy, which for the past 150 years has been built on ever-increasing 
production of oil. ("Production" is the term used by the industry to describe 
removal of oil from the ground. Obviously, the actual producer of oil was the 
natural  process of decomposition of plants and animals over millions of years.)

An excellent book on this subject is James Howard Kunstler's The Long 
Emergency.

Comments on that book, from the publishers website, are below.
Tom
[The website:
http://www.groveatlantic.com/grove/wc.dll?groveproc~book~4185]
======================================================
The Long Emergency
Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century
By James Howard Kunstler

<A HREF="javascript:top.FUNCTIONS.toc(4185)">Table of Contents</A>


Description:

From one of our most exciting thinkers, the most prescient and engaging look 
at the problems we face since Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock.



With his classics of social commentary The Geography of Nowhere and Home from 
Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler has established himself as one of the great 
commentators on American space and place. Now, with The Long Emergency, he 
offers a shocking vision of a post-oil future.



The last two hundred years have seen the greatest explosion of progress and 
wealth in the history of mankind. But the oil age is at an end. The depletion 
of nonrenewable fossil fuels is about to radically change life as we know it, 
and much sooner than we think. As a result of artificially cheap fossil-fuel 
energy we have developed global models of industry, commerce, food production, 
and finance that will collapse. The Long Emergency tells us just what to expect 
after we pass the tipping point of global peak oil production and the 
honeymoon of affordable energy is over, preparing us for economic, political, and 
social changes of an unimaginable scale. 



Are we laboring under a Jiminy Cricket syndrome when we tell ourselves that 
alternative means of energy are just a few years away? Even once they are 
developed, will they ever be able to sustain us in the way that fossil fuels once 
did? What will happen when our current plagues of global warming, epidemic 
disease, and overpopulation collide to exacerbate the end of the oil age? Will the 
new global economy be able to persevere, or will we be forced to revert to 
the more agrarian, localized economy we once knew? Could corporations like 
Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, built on the premise of cheap transportation, become a 
thing of the past? Will the misguided experiment of suburbia—considered a 
birthright and a reality by millions of Americans—collapse when the car culture 
becomes obsolete? 



Riveting and authoritative, The Long Emergency is a devastating indictment 
that brings new urgency and accessibility to the critical issues that will shape 
our future, and that we can no longer afford to ignore. It is bound to become 
a classic of social science.



Warnings from The Long Emergency:



• -The oil age began in 1859 and peaked in 1970. 

The oil endowment allowed us to use the stored energy of millions of years of 
sunlight. Unfortunately the fossilfuel honeymoon is almost over.

• -It has been estimated that without coal, oil, or natural gas, it would 
take several planets just like Earth to support the current number of humans 
living.

• -World oil discovery peaked in the 1960s. Since 1999, the discovery of 
large oil and gas fields has collapsed: 

sixteen in 2000, eight in 2001, three in 2002, and none 

in 2003.

• -There are half a billion cars and trucks currently in use around the world.

• -We will not be rescued by the wished-for hydrogen economy. Our daily 
enjoyment of oil and gas has given us the energy equivalent of three hundred slaves 
per person in the industrialized nations. No combination of alternative 
energies will permit us to continue living the way we do, or even close to it.

• -All the major systems that depend on oil, including manufacturing, trade, 
transportation, agriculture, and the financial markets that serve them, will 
begin to destabilize. The boundaries between politics, economics, and 
collective paranoia will dissolve.



Praise



“In the annals of doomsday literature . . . The Long Emergency is destined to 
become the new standard. . . . Demands frank consideration of what up to now 
has been unthinkable: that the ascendancy of the human race might have been a 
temporary phenomenon. . . . This case has been made before, but here it is 
made powerfully and articulately, with no apology and no hint of reprieve. . . . 
The Long Emergency represents a ‘wake-up call’ in the same sense that a hand 
grenade tossed through your bedroom window might serve as an alarm clock. The 
book is stark and frightening. Read it soon.” —Jim Charlier, Daily Camera



“If you are going to read one non-fiction book this summer . . . this should 
be the one. . . . Long Emergency is a call to action, a book of human 
possibility. . . . A sober, solid, fact-filled look at the intricacies of the modern 
industrial state and its vulnerability to the very environments in which it 
exists. . . . Done in a balanced and impartial manner, free of the usual 
self-righteous indignation found in similar books. . . . You will . . . not be the 
same after having read it.” —Mark Stavish, HermeticInstitute.org



“Funny, irreverent, and blunt . . . To his eternal credit, Kunstler doesn’t 
predict the end of the world; he just doesn’t think that Wal-Mart, monster 
homes or suburban high schools have much of a future.” —Andrew Nikiforuk, Globe &
 Mail



“James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency may be destined to become the 
Dante’s Inferno of the twenty-first century. It graphically depicts the horrific 
punishments that lie ahead for Americans for more than a century of sinful 
consumption and sprawling communities, fueled by the profligate use of cheap oil 
and gas. Its central message—that the country will pay dearly unless it 
urgently develops new, sustainable community-scale food systems, energy sources, 
and living patterns—should be read, digested, and acted upon by every 
conscientious U.S. politician and citizen.” —Michael Shuman, author of Going Local: 
Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age



“James Howard Kunstler has given us, with his usual engaging wit and verve, a 
new kind 

of post-apocalypse scenario. Instead of the nuclear or ice-age wasteland of 
our earlier imaginings, he has depicted with detailed extrapolation the 
civilization of the United States after the oil runs out and a great economic 
collapse occurs. It is a strangely arcadian vision, like the agrarian America that 
Jefferson, Calhoun, and the Southern Agrarians dreamed of. But Kunstler has 
fleshed it out with delightful quirky insights and provided our science fiction 
writers with a fresh mise-en-scene.” —Frederick Turner, author of The New World 
and The Culture of Hope



    



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