Blog de Javier Ferrer

Since my last post yesterday regarding Peak Oil I have received several emails from readers around the world asking me what Peak Oil means. I have been trying to find a good video that explains succintly what Peak Oil is and its implications to our lives. To put it in a few words, the world is going to face an irreversible decline in output of oil while at the same time demand expands. There is simply not going to be enough oil to power our economy in the future. Energy will became scarcer and substitutes will not be able to offset the decline of oil.

I have more than a dozen books covering the oil industry in detail, some of them journalistic in their approach, others more technical and dense. Although reading a good book is the best possible introduction in detail (see my previous post), for newcomers to this topic watching a 1 hour video describing the history of oil and what peak oil is can be the best introduction to this unreported reality.

Certainly, the way we live today in 2008, and how everything is going to change in the coming decades is a drama that few media cover although there is a wide consensus among industry experts that there is little doubt we are going to have to get used to more expensive oil and energy prices, more expensive food, resources wars, and probably a population collapse. With energy becoming more scarce, as well as food, I doubt our little planet can sustain the lives of 9 billion human beings.

I do not know if I will see the full extent of the crisis, since the hardest part will come in the 2030-2050 timeframe and maybe by that time I am no longer here, but for sure, if I have kids one day, they will have to live in a vastly different world from the one we have experienced in the late 20th, early 21st century.

Here you can watch the first half of a very well produced documentary regarding Oil. Its brilliant and pedagogic. I recommend you to watch it to understand better the critical importance of oil to everything we know and that we take for granted.

The End of Oil Part I 

The End of Oil Part II

The End of Oil Part III

Tomorrow I will post the second part of this article. Any comments are certainly appreciated. Feel free to write in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese or Italian. I promise to reply to your comments or requests.

- Javier Ferrer – www.javierferrer.com – www.javierferrer.net -