Industrial Civilisation at a turning point

In the following declaration, Dr. Jeremy Leggett, former member of the UK Government Renewables advisory board and one of “the key players in putting climate change on the world agenda” according to Time Magazine41, described in 2006 how the crisis could unfold:

“The price of houses will collapse. Stock markets will crash. Within a short period, human wealth — little more than a pile of paper at the best of times, even with the confidence about the future high among traders — will shrivel. There will be emergency summits, diplomatic initiatives, urgent exploration efforts, but the turmoil will not subside. Thousands of companies will go bankrupt, and millions will be unemployed… The earth has always been a dangerous place, but now it will become a tinderbox.”42

World leaders are debating on how we should manage the current economic crisis that none of them saw coming, but they shouldn’t be surprised by it. In a 2006 interview, Dr. Colin Campbell effectively forecasted the 2008 oil spike, which was to be followed by a recession and a subsequent fall in oil prices–a scenario that unfolded exactly as he said:

“I think we are facing an oil price shock, 100 or 200 dollars a barrel, an economic recession that cuts demand, and I will not be at all surprised if a fall in demand would make the price collapse again. So we might be back to 20 or 30 dollars a barrel next year perhaps. And so you have a price shock, a recession, a recovery, hits again the falling capacity limit, another price shock. And so I think that in the next few years, we have a sequence of vicious circles and gradually the reality of the situation will filtered through. We are on for a very volatile few years with enormous economic consequences”43

This extract from the Energy Watch Group study on oil production provides useful additional information:

“The world is at the beginning of a structural change of its economic system. This change will be triggered by declining fossil fuel supplies and will influence almost all aspects of our daily life… The now beginning transition period probably has its own rules which are valid only during this phase. Things might happen which we never experienced before and which we may never experience again once this transition period has ended.”47

rates produced 40.5 mb/d of crude oil in 2007 — equal to 58% of world production.

…we estimate that the average observed decline rate worldwide is 6.7%. Were
that rate to be applied to 2007 crude oil production, the annual loss of output would
be 4.7 mb/d.