The Oil Age in perspective

The early human societies living on the Planet had to store food between harvests and keep accounts, which laid the foundations for banking and finance, but if they exhausted the fertility of their soil they either withered away or conquered other lands. Religions played an important part in controlling the societies but there were many wars as empires waxed and waned. Seen in a historical setting, the Oil Age, which opened only about 150 years ago, is an exceptional epoch when energy from petroleum fuelled the rapid expansion of industry, transport, trade and agriculture, allowing the human population to grow six-fold in parallel. But oil and gas are finite resources subject to depletion, meaning that the rising production of the past will be matched by a corresponding decline in the future. The status of depletion is hard to estimate as public data are unreliable but the evidence suggests that the Second Half of the Oil Age dawns. The transition threatens to be a time of great tension, especially in the oil-rich Middle East, but there is much that can be done to plan and prepare for the changed circumstances, once people and their governments come to understand that depletion is imposed by Nature.