With demand for oil declining (because of global recession), OPEC will want to constrain production. With investment capital disappearing in a deflationary bonfire, oil companies will have difficulty financing new projects (even if they have full governmental go-ahead to drill, baby, drill). Thus even though the peak might have been delayed for another year or five if the credit crunch hadn’t intervened, that time cushion is now effectively gone.

This is not to say that Peak Oil should no longer to be considered to be of importance. In the larger, longer view of things, the energy decline will be the determining factor in the fate of our civilization—not a money or credit crisis.

When the world finally begins to recover from its financial turmoil (and this could take a few years), and oil demand picks back up again, the economy will bump up against oil supply constraints and petroleum prices will skyrocket, undermining the economic recovery.

Even though oil demand will have been constrained in the intervening years, depletion of existing fields will have continued, so that new production projects (when the industry finally gets around to financing them) will have that much more of a decline rate to offset.

We are in the Hirsch Report’s worst-case scenario—only it’s worse.

The only choice remaining for policy makers is whether to shift all of our collective societal efforts toward building new infrastructure for the low-energy future, or to try vainly just to prop up the credit markets, losing what will probably be the last opportunity to salvage industrial economies.

The amount of time left for dithering—if indeed there still is any—can perhaps be measured in only months.

The silver lining is this: Policy makers now are starting to realize that they must do something dramatic. Timid moves are showing themselves woefully insufficient to deal with the scale of the unfolding economic collapse. Thus a change of direction toward a true energy transition is no longer to be ruled out simply because of the boldness and scale of effort required. The single barrier that remains is the decision-makers’ lack of understanding of the real problem confronting them—and us.