Just how dangerous and delusional this assessment is likely to prove is the subject of five recent books on the future of petroleum: David Goodstein's Out of Gas, Richard Heinberg's The Party's Over, Paul Roberts's The End of Oil Sonia Shah's Crude: The Story of Oil and Matthew Yeomans's Oil: Anatomy of an Industry. These compelling and provocative books address disparate aspects of the larger problem, but all arrive at the same chilling conclusions:

§ The production of deep-sea and Siberian oil and the development of unconventional sources of supply will prove too costly, too risky and too environmentally hazardous to provide a significant accretion to dwindling supplies of conventional oil.

§ Hydrogen and renewables may, at some point, prove viable alternatives to petroleum, but their development is proceeding far too slowly to substitute for disappearing oil during the next few decades. (Two of these authors, Goodstein and Heinberg, question whether these alternatives will ever prove an adequate substitute for petroleum.)

§ Continued reliance on petroleum and other fossil fuels (coal, natural gas) for the majority of our energy supply--90 percent, in the case of the United States--will intensify the buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, thus hastening the onset of relentless droughts, heat waves, sea-level surges and other cataclysmic climate changes.

§ America's political leaders, like those of most other countries, are far too committed to the industrial status quo to provide the energetic and visionary leadership needed to commence the global transition to a post-petroleum economy. Moreover, the large US energy companies--which often exercise great influence over the nation's political leaders--are determined to prevent this transition for as long as they possibly can.

§ By not embarking immediately on a major program of conservation and change, we will sink deeper into dependency on oil and thus find ourselves increasingly vulnerable to the devastating consequences of post-peak energy scarcity. If we start now on the transition to hydrogen and other substitutes, we have a fighting chance of averting total economic collapse when oil begins to disappear; but the longer we wait, the greater the likelihood that the needed alternatives will not be ready in time, and so we (or our children) will be condemned to extreme deprivation.

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