I pose this question as a topic for discussion, not as a doom and gloom post or some prophetic prediction of future catastrophe. It's no secret that the key component to our modern "civilizations" is the production and harnessing of energy, chiefly the use of oil. Nearly everything in the modern world is either powered by oil, or is made through a chemical manufacturing process using oil and oil by-products.
All of our plastics, automobile components, electronic devices and many other things that we take for granted, are all composed synthetically using oil. There are roughly 7 gallons of oil in every tire. In agriculture, all of the pesticides and herbicides are made from oil. Toothbrushes, toothpastes, and the tubes that they come in are made from petroleum products.
The problem with all this is that oil is a finite resource. It is non renewable and once we use it up, it's gone. There are varying statistics out there but the most current estimates of production and consumption are about 94 million barrels a day, and 93 million barrels a day, respectively. These are the most recent figures that I found with a quick internet search and are from 3 years ago in 2015. As the population continues to multiply and more and more vehicles are put onto the roads worldwide, we are rapidly reaching a point where the world's oil supply could be exhausted.
The man pictured above is Marion King Hubbert who was a geophysicist that worked for Royal Dutch Shell for many years, and who, in 1956 gave a presentation before the American Petroleum Institute in San Antonio, Texas where he made public his theory of Peak Oil. In the Hubbert Peak Oil theory, he explained that the exploration, discovery, and production of a finite resource such as oil, follows a bell curve where it rises, peaks, and then declines as no new discoveries are made and the costs of investment in production become greater than the net energy output of the resource.
Initially, many of the experts and executives in the energy industry scoffed at his predictions which at the time seemed ridiculous to them, but gradually over the years his predictions have seen realization, even though it took a few decades longer. He predicted that the United States would hit peak production in the 1970's and his theories indirectly led to the energy "crisis" during Jimmy Carter's administration.
Much of Hubbert's work and research paper links can be found below.
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/Hubbert/
The 1970's and early 80's are remembered as being the end of American made, gas guzzling muscle cars and cheap gasoline. I still remember gas being 89 cents a gallon in my youth and as teenagers growing up in a small southern town, our weekend outings never had a particular destination. Instead, we would gas up our cars and just ride the streets for hours. Back then you could fill up a tank with $15-20 bucks and cruise all night long.
Those days are long gone and will never return, these days I drive an hour commute to work and have to carpool with several other co-workers to keep costs down for all if us. Those who called Hubbert an "alarmist" in the 60's and 70's must be cringing every time they stop at the pump to fill up.
I recommend watching the documentary Collapse by director Chris Smith from 2009 which features Michael Ruppert and focuses mainly on Peak Oil and how it ties in directly with 9-11, the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and how it directly effected the world in 2009.
We are literally pumping out the lifeblood of our habitat, it's no wonder that natural disasters seem to be on the rise. Everything is occurring more frequently and with more intensity, from earthquakes and hurricanes to volcanic eruptions and wildfires. All of the drilling under the seabed combined with the fracking being done on the land, cannot possibly have a positive affect on the planet's enviornment. In the state of Florida where I live, we have seen an unsettling rise in sinkholes, most of them opening up suddenly and swallowing up entire homes and businesses.
All of our raping and pillaging the enviornment has had other serious consequences on the enviornnment. The logging industry clearcuts millions of trees every year, leaving behind nothing but stumps and a depleted landscape. Not a single tree is replanted and thousands upon thousands of hectares of natural wildlife habitats and ecosystems are destroyed.
Canada's boreal forests store 34% of the world's carbon emissions alone, and with these forests being destroyed daily, all those carbon emissions are being released back into the atmosphere. This is akin to cutting out the lungs of planet earth and not giving her a transplant.
Killing the trees means that the root systems die as well, and without the roots to hold the soil and absorb the rainwater, the soil erodes and washes away, thus further destroying the area.
Everything moves in cycles and follows a universal process of birth, growth, maturation, decay, and death. There's no such thing as infinite growth whether you are talking about an economy, life, or a civilization. Civilizations rise and fall, following the same life cycle of other living organisms. A book that I highly recommend is The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, which outlines and clarifies the life cycle of empires.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West
In conclusion, we have already reached the climax of this divine comedy known as "civilization" where we destroy our living habitat as well as each other for the shallow, hollow, and worthless pursuit of an ideology called "money." It is a powerful spell that has nearly the entire human race in it's death grip. Those who are blinded by greed, lust for power, and attainment of material gains care not for the havoc they wreak or the trail of bodies that they leave behind...