An introduction to Peak Oil

Contrary to popular opinion we do not live in the Information Age. What we live in is the Oil Age. Look around you and you’ll have a virtually impossible task of trying to find something that isn’t tied back to oil – be it hip replacement surgery, the little pieces of plastic wrapped around the ends of your shoelaces, or the vast infrastructure that makes the so-called “Information Age” possible.

But not only is the relatively superfluous dependent on oil, but so is the very non-superfluous, such as food we eat. Not simply an issue of food being shipped around the world on the back of fossil fuels, the fact of the matter is that fossil fuels are used to plant and harvest our foods, and upon much else, the very fertilizers we spread on our fields are mined from the ground and even derived from fossil fuels themselves (the ammonia and urea we apply to our fields for nitrogen are products of nitrogen atoms paired in the air around us of which were split and combined with hydrogen from natural gas). Simply put, oil and the rest of the fossil fuels are the “lifeblood” of industrial civilization and our modern way of life.

Enter peak oil.

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