With the price of crude oil recently hovering around US$115 a barrel, the perils of our planet’s addiction to petroleum have never been clearer. A scarcity of oil has a ripple effect not only on common foodstuff (in the last twelve months rice has become 75% dearer, soya almost 90%, and flour has more than doubled) but also on the viability of the vast transportation network that resupplies much of the developed world with consumer goods. Given the current fragility of the American economy, unaffordable oil could deepen the impending US recession, or even trigger a worldwide depression and alter the geopolitical landscape for the next decade. If that sounds like a stretch, consider the fact that according to Michael Klare — an American professor who has written prescient analyses of the political, military and economic consequences of depleted energy resources — “oil-exporting countries collected an estimated $970 billion from the importing countries in 2006, and the take for 2007, when finally calculated, is expected to be far higher.”
