Personal debt, foreign debt and national debt are all growing issues around the world. The whole consumer based economy relies on an unlimited credit lines and accumulation of massive amounts of debt. Debt is the assumption that the future will be richer than now (else wise, you wouldn't be able to pay it off). The rate that debt is growing suggests that people expect the future to be exponentially larger. The problem I have with that is that a larger future, and a more complex society, requires more and easier energy. In fact, the correlation between human prosperity and oil production is almost perfect. How can we make the assumption of an ever-larger future based on things that require finite resources? And it's not about the day when we run out of oil, it's about the day when we reach peak oil – that is the amount we can produce in a given time period for a certain cost starts to decrease. At the point of peak oil, 50% of total oil is still around. I personally believe that we need to get off oil. Fast. Or, rethink our economic model. Either way, major difficulties are coming to our ways of life in the mid term (if we don't get off oil, and our economies can't keep growing at the rates that our ever-growing debts require us to grow at, we will see collapses of the financial sectors, and our currencies). A constant global supply of oil has been critical in ensuring the economy runs smoothly. Every single recession and boom in the last one hundred years has been related to the global oil supply.
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