The World After Oil

It's an understatement to say that fossil energy is important to modern life. It's essential to modernity. All the freedom, mobility and utility are based upon the very energy that we are consuming today. Merely 200 years ago, our life style is unthinkable, and probably 200 years from now, our life style will again be unthinkable. Our time perhaps is just a burst in human history and a play with a sudden spoil.

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico for Americans is a problem with oil corporation, the industry and government supervision. But for humanity, it's a symbol of limit. Such limit was everywhere, in the Chinese coal mines, the Canadian shale fields. the Middle East battle field and finally the seashore south of the US. People are dying and the environment is ruined, all for the "rising living standard" of our generation.

Sooner or later the oil or all forms of fossil fuels will be gone. 100, 200, 500 years from now, what will the world look like? Without oil (other resources notwithstanding), how can we sustain 6 billion, later this century 9 billion people? More specifically, without oil, what would the US, a country built upon oil, be like? What would so called globalization be like?

Old Chinese saying "without long term considerations, there must be short term worries". Even if oil reserve is still abundant for another century, we might have to think about the world without oil, and be prepared for it.