FW: Peak Oil Crisis. (One perspective)

There is a problem with oil. People tell you that it's ok, we have enough oil left in the world to last us another 50 years. But that's a bunch crap. The US fills up about 4% of the total population of the earth, but we consume about 25% of the petroleum produced worldwide. It's an enormously disproportionate amount that we use. China and India are well known for having a plurality of the world's population. Historically, they have used relatively little energy and oil for fuel, but their economies are starting to boom. China is quickly leaving the third world and is industrializing faster than any other nation on earth. The population of both China and India (put together, not each) is expected to grow by 25% by the year 2025, and their consumption is expected to double by then. Can you imagine all those billions of people using as much energy as the US currently uses? It's almost unfathomable. Chinese people are expected to increase their use of personal automobiles by more than five-fold by 2025, and all of Chinese citizenry will be demanding oil to fuel their cars.
That's not the only problem we have. There is a limited amount of oil on the earth. The US demands far more oil than we are able to produce. We stopped discovering new oilfields on American turf in the 1930s, and by 1971 we had stopped producing enough oil to match our demand. Since then we have been force to import additional oil at an increasing rate. Whenever one country begins its decline, it imports from someone else. Then that second country reaches its own peak of oil production sooner and begins its decline. Now both nations are forced to import from a third country, who runs out of oil even more quickly because they are trying to supply the needs of three oil-thirsty countries. This leads to a domino effect, forcing nations to reach the point of no return, the beginning of their decline in oil production. When a country exhausts its oil fields, there is no going back. There simply isn't any more. The days of the Texan oilman are over. They can no longer guarantee that their oil fields will yield enough to meet demand, and their resources are depleting very rapidly. This is happening worldwide. It's already in progress. US fossil fuels have lasted us barely 150 years, and now they are gone. We can hold onto some natural gas mines or some oil reserves for another 5 or 10 years and then they are completely gone. Other nations are starting to face the same dilemma. What do we do when there is no more oil?
Some experts place the date of depletion of the world's oil supply around 2035, others who are more optimistic place it at 2050. If China and India indeed begin demanding more oil at an exponential growth rate, the number could even be as low as 2030. In any case, no one has ventured to estimate that our oil reserves and new discoveries could possibly last us longer than 40 years from now. Experts estimate that before the end of oil, crude oil prices will skyrocket to $300 per barrel. After that, we will have no way to fuel our cars. There will be no way to transport anything over long distances, shipping will grind to a halt, and produce will stay in the fields to rot. There are no backup plans. Urban dwellers will starve, because there will be no food to be found anywhere in the city. The Peak Oil crisis will force the survival of the fittest. The world's human population will plummet to pre-industrial revolution lows. We will no longer continue to support human life's exponential growth. There will be panic and extreme economic depressions worldwide, deeper depressions than have ever been recorded in world history. Television and radio broadcasts will cease, communication will become impossible. Civilization could collapse entirely.
That's the problem with our dependence on foreign oil. It speeds up the domino effect. It hastens the collapse of modern society. All electronic information will be lost, scientific progress will be erased, and all the hard work of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries will have been largely in vain, from a "conservation of humanity" standpoint. The rise of industrial technology and our addiction to oil could lead to the undoing of mankind.