The End of the Oil Age  

Christopher Lydon's "Open Source Radio" at the University of Massachusetts has done a show (mp3) on the end of the oil age, with James Kunstler telling the peak oil story and Michael Lynch attempting the rebuttal (thanks to Leslie for the tip).

We may remember the Age of Oil, when it’s over, as a century or so of miracles: not just the new landscape of highways and suburbs with two cars in every driveway; we’ll remember the petroleum-fertilizers that grew farm products almost without farmers, and jet fuels that delivered fresh grapes from Chile to Chicago every day and carried the average Caesar salad 2500 miles from lettuce field to supper table. It’s been oil-charged agriculture that just in this century grew the world’s population five-fold. It’s been cheap plentiful oil that underwrote the idea that everything in the way of travel and trade was easy. Now James Howard Kunstler is here to tell you the rest of the story: half of all the oil on the planet is gone while our consumption is spiking; the miracles are about to run dry. The Stone Age came to end not for want of stones; but what are we of the Oil Age going to do when the oil runs out, as it must?