Draw a line five miles long to represent the millions of years during which solar energy has been captured and laid down in the earth's crust in the form of coal, gas and oil. Then put a blip in it. That blip represents the time we have taken to extract and use this embodied energy. We are half way through the blip.
These fuels have given us a material standard of living that previous generations could not have imagined in their wildest dreams. Coal gave Britain an Empire and the US gained global power by being the first to exploit oil. Scientific progress would have been stultified without these fuels. But we treat them as a permanent part of the economy. They are not. Our grandchildren will have to manage without them.
M. King Hubbert said, in 1956, that oil extraction in the US would peak after 15 years and then decline, never to revive. At the time extraction was relentlessly increasing and oil companies said he was mad. In 1971 US oil production duly peaked, as he predicted, and has declined ever since in spite of a desperate hunt supported by the most sophisticated equipment in the world. The US, though it started with 10% of the world's oil (for 4.3% of world's population) now uses a quarter of the world's oil production and imports two-thirds of this. World oil is following the same pattern of discovery and extraction, and we are at the peak.
