Those of you who have ever bothered to read my posts on this topic will recognize my "economic stair-stepping into the abyss" prediction (highlighted in bold below), confirmed here by the Irish Times:
Ireland 'among most vulnerable' to peak oil
It is hard to overstate the extent to which our daily lives are subsidised by cheap, plentiful oil, writes JOHN GIBBONS.
HERE’S A conundrum: restarting global economic growth will, by definition, push up energy costs. Rising energy costs will in turn choke off that economic recovery, leading to a fall in energy prices. Try to restart growth again, and the brick wall of energy costs magically reappears. Repeat ad infinitum.It is hard to overstate the extent to which our daily lives are subsidised by cheap, plentiful oil. Every 24 hours, Ireland burns around 200,000 barrels. That’s the daily equivalent of the muscle power of 2.4 million men, each working for a full year.
Our entire way of life depends on abundant, inexpensive oil. This era is now drawing to a close. Five years ago, the Hirsch report published by the US department of energy concluded that the world has “never faced a problem” as difficult as peak oil, adding that: “without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary”. Oil peaking will be, it warned, “abrupt and revolutionary”.
The advent of peak oil is, by definition, the end of decades of relentless economic growth, since this dramatic phase in human history has been entirely predicated on ready access to vast amounts of cheap energy.
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http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0408/1224267889272.html