american, o

The American Series, #2:

According to the Hirsch report, the world will change abruptly and in a revolutionary manner after the inevitability of peak oil, especially for countries like the United States that rely heavily on oil, and while we may have the technology to eventually adjust to this change, it will take twenty years to adjust to it if we hope to have no substantial impacts on our everyday lives if we finish the transition before oil has peaked, and ten years if we all take enormous efforts to mitigate. But if we wait until oil peaks, then we’ll have an energy crisis for at least twenty years, and the impact on modern society as we know it will be devastating.

That being said, many estimations for peak oil center it around this time period (if it has not already peaked), so it is likely that Americans will have an incredibly difficult time in the coming decade or two trying to live the way that they’re used to. However, these predictions are very hard to pinpoint and many have tried in the past and have failed to figure out how much oil is there to extract. But there IS a finite amount of oil that is becoming more costly to extract, and thus more costly to transport ourselves over long distances in a timely, efficient manner, which seems to be one of the key ingredients for our American economy.

OK Aaron, enough preaching.