I've probably spent too much time lately reading books with depressing titles like Our Final Hour by Martin Rees, The End of Oil by Paul Roberts or The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler. These are writers who aren't afraid to look unflinchingly at an event that most people are unwilling to contemplate, but which nearly everyone, at some level, must know is coming: the peak of worldwide hydrocarbon production, particularly oil and gas. There's disagreement about whether that peak is occurring right now or whether it will occur in 10, 20 or 30 years, but nearly everyone who thinks about things like this agrees that it will happen in the lifetimes of many people who are alive today.

The peak of worldwide production doesn't mean the end of oil, but it does mean that there will be less and less of the cheap, sweet crude that has shaped the modern world, which is largely based on the inexpensive transportation of goods and people by means of the internal combustion engine. Unfortunately, the best remaining oil reserves belong to countries that won't be all that sympathetic to our plight. As time goes on, oil will become harder and harder to extract until we reach a point of diminishing returns: It will take more energy to extract the oil from the ground than the oil itself contains.

Kunstler, in The Long Emergency, is particularly pessimistic. He believes, quite reasonably, that our culture is so dependent on access to cheap oil that, as competition heats up over the last of the good oil, we are likely to stay in the fight (Iraq, Iran?) rather than to modify our oil-dependent way of life. Even then, the oil will eventually run out. The oilless world that Kuntsler projects looks to the Amish for a model, a world in which the focus of culture will be local rather than national or global, where food will be grown locally using real horsepower, the kind that consumes oats rather than gasoline. The century-long joyride provided by the anomalous quirk of nature that created vast hydrocarbon pools beneath Earth's surface will be over. Depressing.