The Era of Xtreme Energy  

TomDispatch has another one of their regular articles from Michael Klare on resource wars, peak oil and "Life After the Age of Oil" - The Era of Xtreme Energy

Talk about roller-coaster rides: the price of a barrel of crude oil, which was still under $20 the week after September 11, 2001, made it to $147 in July 2008, just before the global economic meltdown, only to hit a low of $32.40 early this year. And yet, in recent months, hardly noticed, it's crept back above $70 -- and this with "recovery" barely on the horizon and global industrial demand still muted at best. And that's the good news.

Surely, as economic activity picks up, oil demand will rise and prices will resume their upward march. And don't be fooled by a spate of announcements, as recently in the Gulf of Mexico, of new oil discoveries, as Michael Klare, author of the invaluable book Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, indicates. If there is a surge in industrial demand globally, recent discoveries will have little impact on the growing supply of energy.

"It's still the one," energy expert Daniel Yergin says of oil in the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine. Yergin, author of a classic history of oil, The Prize, claims that petroleum will dominate the global energy equation for decades to come. Look elsewhere and you can find sprightly scenarios for energy futures based on climate-friendly renewable energy sources. As Klare makes painfully clear, however, there's a third way -- and that is distinctly not good news. We are going to enter an age of Xtreme energy, he suggests, and the last-ditch efforts to keep our world on its normal course are likely to devastate the environment, accelerate climate change, inflict widespread pain, and create global conflict. It's not a pretty picture.