I found this site very interesting. It seems trustworthy. It's a big discussion of "peak oil", that oil production follows a bell shaped curve, that we are at the peak and oil production will soon fall, causing oil prices to sky rocket. When oil supply fell by 5% in 1970 oil shocks, the price of oil quadrupled! The difference now is that these oil shocks are permanent, supply of oil will continue to fall.

There are oil alternatives but the market will only point to these when they are economically viable. When the market signals to switch to these alternatives it may already be too late. Also, not only must an alternative be economically viable, it must also be ECONOMICALLY SCALABLE. It must be able to replace oil EVERYWHERE. We currently don't have anything that can do this, so when we need to make a switch away from oil, we won't be able to make the switch. This means trucks and boats and what not will need to run on super expensive petrol to transport food to people. I'm not exactly sure what will happen in this situation (I'm still in school, I don't have an economics degree or anything), but I'm pretty sure supply of food will be very limited. If this happens, our economy will be shattered and no one's going to be developing an economically scalable alternative. And then there's stuff like exchange rate and the financial system being reliant on increasing supplies of oil. You should read that link for an explanation of those.

Mitigation to help us through this switch to oil alternatives needs to start now if we want to make it through (well it probably needed to start a decade or so ago). It doesn't look like this is happening (everything's going on business as usual), so I think this oil crash is going to hit us quite hard. Hopefully the fight against global warming will gather momentum. Investing in and switching to energy alternatives before they are economically viable solves both these problems.

I suggest you read that link I posted earlier. It explains things very well.

I honestly don't think oil is going to run out during our lifetimes. However, demand is constantly increasing at a fast pace due to normal growth in the western countries and the industrialization of developing countries, while supply is decreasing due to the traditionally largest oil fields running low, and the extraction of what is left becoming more and more expensive.

I think there's going to be a lot of problems about this during our lifetimes. Not as bad as the worst predictions, and certainly not as negligible as some are saying, but serious problems that will probably affect our lives. The next few generations after us will probably think of us as idiots for not seeing it coming, as they always do.