How will you heat your house? How much will transported food go up in price? How will we pay for plastics, metals, rubber, cheap flights, DVDs, 3G phones and everlasting economic growth? The basic answer is, we won't.

Sometimes known as "Hubberts' Peak" after the American geologist M.K. Hubbert who accurately predicted the peak in US oil production in 1971, "Peak Oil" refers to the maximum extraction rate of oil, after which the rate of extraction will decline.

World discovery of oil peaked in 1964 and has been declining ever since, despite considerable improvements in technology, and there is no prospect of any significant new large discoveries. We are currently consuming more than 4 barrels of oil for every one discovered. In the wake of the Iraq war, the rapid economic rise of China, global warming and recent record oil prices, the debate has shifted from "if" there is a global peak to "when".

It is widely believed that we are now approaching World Oil Peak . According to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) world oil peak is likely to occur sometime between 2008 and 2010. Some analysts believe we may have already passed the peak and are currently on an uneven plateau. It seems certain however that within a few years, the effects of oil peak will begin to be felt as for the first time in history the amount of available energy in the world begins to decline. ASPO calculate the rate of decline after peak to be about 2% per year.

So What?
That doesn't sound to drastic- surely we can make up the shortfall by taking measures to increase energy efficiency and avoid waste? Energy efficiency and more frugal use of energy are certainly important steps we can take, but if the Peak in production is already upon us, we may be forced to make sudden and abrupt changes to our lifestyles if we are to avoid the worst consequences of oil depletion in a world so heavily dependent on oil for the lions share of its economy, trade, industry and general lifestyle.

Scarcity of everything
It is not just higher prices at the pumps that will indicate a looming energy crises. Think about it and the more you do the more apparent it becomes that nearly everything we do in the modern world is predicated on an unending availability of cheap fossil fuels.

In the modern world, the average food item has travelled between 1000 and 1500 miles before it arrives on our plates. For every 1 calorie of energy in our food we have burned 10 calories of fossil fuel energy in farm machinery, fertiliser, pesticides and packaging. If you want a definition of "unsustainable", there it is. This situation simply cannot continue, and one of the most pressing responses we need to make is to start growing our food closer to home using organic and low-energy intensive methods.

The petrochemical industry is not just about energy; almost anything you care to mention relies on oil-based products. The pharmaceutical industry for medical necessities; the transport infrastructure for construction materials like asphalt; the ICT industry for computer systems, white electrical goods; all plastics and plastic based products; agriculture, and not just to fuel tractors and combine harvesters, fertilisers and herbicides are oil- and gas-based, and farmers use animal feeds that come from around the world. The list goes on.

What about alternative energy?
It takes a while to really let it sink in the truly extraordinary properties of oil which make it effectively irreplaceable by any combination of alternatives. One way to understand this is the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) ratio for any given energy source. Currently, oil is yielding an EROEI of about 8:1 and this will only decline as the remaining reserves become increasingly difficult to obtain. Still, this is far higher a return than almost anything else (except solar photovoltaic cells) all alternatives currently require oil in their manufacture and maintenance, be it high quality steel in windmills or simply keeping the service roads and vehicles going.

Bio diesel would require perhaps all the available agricultural land just to supply petrol at the pumps, but when you consider that it takes 80-90 barrels of oil just to manufacture a car, it becomes clear that alternatives will come nowhere near to making up the shortfall.

The problem is that not just that we need more energy than we can get , but that we have created a society that depends on it because of its versatility, liquidity (which makes it easy to move around) and also because we can make so many things out of it, including plastics and asphalt for our roads.

We won’t be powering the vast fleets of international air transport on wind power. And we won’t be repairing roads with sunbeams.

What about Hydrogen?
Hydrogen is not an energy source but an energy store, all you need is water and electricity, but the electricity has to be produced from conventional sources of energy.

What about Nuclear?
There are reports of new breeds of fail-safe reactors. Even if nuclear power were a safe option - and the record of the nuclear industry thus far is lamentable - we would need ultimately thousands more nuclear power stations to replace the energy we get from oil and this would require an enormous capital investment and energy investment. There is a time-lapse of 10-20 years from drawing board to energy production from nuclear power and we may be entering a world of energy descent within the next 5 years or less. There simply won't be the spare capacity to build the power stations. Not only that, but uranium is itself a depleting resource, mined and transported at great environmental cost and risk, that will deplete all the more rapidly if we use it to replace fossil fuels.

What does this mean?
At present, UK gets 43% of its energy from oil, 34.8% from natural gas and 1.3% from coal and 0.5% from renewables. Oil and gas reserves are declining. Oil production in 2004 was 30% lower than the record level seen in 1999 and 10% lower than in 2003. Six new fields started production in 2004, but production from these fields was insufficient to make up the general decline in production from older established fields. Gas production in 2004 was 7% lower than in 2003. As with oil, UK gas production is also declining as UK Continental Shelf reserves deplete. (Government DTI energy statistics report see at  http://www.dti.gov.uk/energy/inform)

This masks an even deeper dependency, however, since the transport sector is almost entirely dependent on oil. Since so many aspects of our lives depend upon the transportation of goods and services, as well as commuting to work, any disruption in oil supplies would quickly bring society to a standstill.

A taste of what this might entail was experienced in parts of the UK during the truckers' strike a few years ago. Unlike the strike, however, Peak Oil will mean that these disruptions will eventually become permanent, and we badly need to make alternative arrangements for the supply of these goods, such as growing food more locally.

But we’ve got plenty of time to sort it all out!
The bottom line is, it will take at least 20-30 years to switch over to any new or alternative energy resource, and we won’t have the time or the spare capacity to do so. Blackouts and energy shortages such as effected millions of people across the US in 2002 are increasingly likely as of now, and reports of escalating oil prices are reported daily.

Technology has never invented a new source of energy; it has only devised new ways to use energy. The whole fabric of what we know of as "the modern world" has been woven from cheap oil, and we are soon going to find that this world is going to change dramatically and in ways we can as yet scarcely contemplate as we begin to run out. Many analysts see the US invasion of Iraq as only the first blow of what could become globally escalating resource wars for the last remaining oil supplies. Here at home social relations could be severely strained and shortages and soaring prices could mean queuing at petrol stations and unaffordable heating bills for many. Unemployment may increase and ultimately there may be a shortage of basic commodities such as food as the economic relationships of world trade begin to break down with the unavailability of oil.

Time for a change for a better world
The real issue is not about the amount of energy per se but what we want do we want the energy for? How much do we really need? What will we use energy for if we have it? And do we need an economic system that requires unending growth which itself requires endlessly more energy? Now is a golden opportunity to ask these deeper questions about the kind of society we want to live in. There is abundant evidence that simply more growth, more money and more energy will not bring us a higher quality of life or more fulfilment.

The good news is that Peak Oil also presents an unrivalled opportunity to embrace the reality that environmentalists have known for over 40 years - that the Industrial Growth Society is unsustainable and therefore will inevitably come to an end. Like Communism, the Capitalist system has not fulfilled its promise. In a word, it is a failed system. We now have a window of opportunity to implement ideas and structures that do not rely on an endless supply of cheap oil but can provide a high quality of life that is socially just and ecologically sustainable.

For more information see:
 http://www.peakoil.net
 http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
 http://www.hubbertpeak.com