I recommend this wholeheartedly, but especially because of two salient points Roberts makes:

First, oil depletion or peak oil is NOT the only issue affecting the use of oil as an energy source – environmental degradation and geopolitical instability MUST be spoken about in any discussion of the issue.

We’re coming to the end of the EASY oil – oil that will push itself right out of the earth. More and more, seawater must be pumped into the oil fields to push the oil out of the ground, and oil is being discovered in more and more difficult places to reach. This will only lead to increased costs.

As it becomes more and more difficult and costly to reach the oil, the more and more geopolitical power being handed over to other countries, and this leads into Roberts’s second point that I want to highlight, which he makes in the afterward to the paperback edition:

”...the greatest casualty of the Iraq war may be the very idea of energy security. Before the war, it was generally accepted by world leaders – and oil traders – that if global oil production truly did become threatened by political instability or terrorism, the United States could restore order, and exports, through some measure of diplomatic or military intervention…

But with the continuing fiasco in Iraq, it is now clear that even the most powerful military entity in world history cannot stabilize a country at will or “make” it produce oil simply by sending in soldiers and tanks. In other words, since the Iraq invasion, the oil market now understands that the United States cannot [Roberts emphasis] guarantee the security of oil supplies – for itself or for anyone else.”

And that, my friends, spells t-r-o-u-b-l-e.

Roberts is NOT overly alarmist, he makes it clear that we’re not going to run out of oil tomorrow, we have some time to fix this. But he sternly warns that this time is rapidly becoming shorter and shorter.