Man in the past 200 years has increased his knowledge, standard of living and life span more than at anyother period of mans time on the planet. The great increases have come starting around 1900, which has been called the Oil Century. For it was oil that released the genie from the bottle. Today oil touches everything in our lives from the plastic bottle you drink your water from to the computer screen your watching as you read this. However this increase in world civilization is not sustainable, because the world has reached or is about to reach Peak Oil Production.
By releasing the genie from the bottle that oil represents, the world population has more than doubled since 1962. From 3 Billion people to 7 Billion people, all of whom want to own Porsches and live the life in Beverly Hills. To sustain the economy needed more and more oil is needed to feed the machine. However because Peak Production has been reached the cost of energy is going to continually increase over the next few decades as competion for that resource increases. At some point in time men are going to be like rats in cage scrambling over themselves to get the ever dwindling resources available. At this point in time it does not seem likely that another energy source can replace oil on the scale needed to supply an ever increasing population and their economic needs. At some point in time this economy will collapse, and there will be a rapid decline in the worlds population as the economy will not be there to sustain it.
Here in the USA Peak Oil Production was reached in the 1970s and it was at that time that manufacturing in the USA started to decline and move offshore. The main reasons were that the cost of energy and labour to sustain that industrial economy became too costly. It was cheaper to move offshore. So the USA began transitioning itself to a service economy. The Democratic Party is touting universal health care, as 47 million people are without it in the USA. This is simply not a realistic goal going into the futher as the cost of energy skyrockets. The outlook for the USA is that people are simply going to have to do with continually less and less as the cost of energy inreases. In the past it, with cheap energy available the cost of producing an item was broken down into a dime for energy cost and 90 cents for the material and labour. In the futher it will be 90 cents for the energy to produce the item and 10 cents for the material and labour.
Then comes the issue of Global Warming. As man unburys the Carbons he uses for the energy to propel the economy and releases them into the air the temperature increases. At some point in the near futher (scientists think within 10 years) the tipping point will have been reached where planet itself will be increasing the temperature to right itself, no matter what man does to modify his behavior. The planet in time will cool again but the question is will man still be here to see it?
