Oil Consumption
By the middle of this decade, we were consuming around 85 million barrels of crude oil per day. Records inform us that we had already extracted and burnt more than 900 billion barrels by 2003. The average estimate of our planet's total endowment of extractable oil reserves is around 2,000 billion. So, we have successfully removed about half of the reserves, laid down over the last billion years.

Peak Oil
When global oil demand exceeds supply for more than a few weeks, economies across the world see the price of oil soar. If indeed the oil industry's combined outputs are beginning to top out, increasing evidence that the point of 'Peak Oil' is nigh, is likely to cause immediate and unprecedented havoc across the world. We know what happens when oil supplies become insecure for a matter of weeks, one can only speculate on the multitudinous effects that a perpetual situation of declining global oil supply will engender. Power outages and fuel rationing will hinder the provision of basic services and supplies that most have become accustomed to, and without technological, political and social solutions to the new challenges, civil unrest will be inevitable.

Blind Politics
Developing renewables to the level that can compensate for the exhausted oil supplies is a massive global project that has suffered political delays for several decades. Few of our leaders charged with strategic planning have accepted that oil replacement is the most important issue they will ever have to consider in their lifetime.

In November 2005, The International Energy Agency issued a warning that 17 trillion dollars of investment is needed immediately, not to fast-track the development and deployment of renewables, but to try and extract the remaining oil stocks out of the ground even quicker than we are presently managing.

Most political groups holding power over the world today still consider investing in nuclear and conventional weapons of war as offering better value than investing in a long-term carbon neutral society. History can only record the blindness of previous leaders for future generations; it sadly can't protect us from the legacy of their deeds.