Peak oil is starting to rear its ugly head

[NJ5]

I had heard of Peak Oil as early as the end of last century, however I didn't pay much attention to it that time.

With all the news coverage lately about increasing oil/gas prices, I started researching a bit about Peak Oil, and the current status of world oil production.

After a few days of quite intensive reading and thinking, I have some preliminary conclusions:

1- This world is even more dependant on cheap oil than I thought, even in the most important things such as food. Did you know, for example, that virtually all steps of modern agriculture involve a significant amount of oil? Fertilizers, pest control, all the maintaining and harvesting of fields, obviously shipping I was truly surprised after reading some reports.

2- I realized that Peak Oil looks to be getting really close (in the best case 15 years away, in the worst case very soon), and frankly it looks quite worrying.

3- Both the mass media and the financial media aren't doing great coverage of some issues, which seems to cause most people to think Peak Oil theories are just from a bunch of lunatics. Most people don't know that many countries are proved to have peaked already, and the biggest producer (Saudi Arabia) seems to be having difficulties increasing production.

4- Investment in renewables doesn't seem to be happening fast enough to counter the increasingly expensive fossil fuels (oil/coal). This might cause some countries to increase investment in coal, which is the most pollutant of all fuels and would cause even faster global warming.

This is a very big subject, and there's probably some important things I forgot to mention, maybe they'll pop up when some of you reply.

I don't want to go into the more controversial stuff here, such as economical doomsday scenarios, but let it be said that my view of the world's future is more pessimist than it was a few months ago. I'm usually a very optimistic person, but I do think that the world isn't keeping up in getting ready for increasing oil prices. I'll be keeping a close eye on this since I don't want to lose the money I have invested, in some sort of stock market crash.