I blogged about this before, over two years ago. But I recently read a frightening article in Maclean's called After Cheap Oil that brought this back to my attention. Some of the gems:

• High oil prices are causing a downturn in the auto industry, forcing Ford to cut jobs
• Rising prices will turn suburbs into ghost towns and drive Wal-Mart out of business
• At $200/barrel, someone making $12/hour would work roughly a day and a half to fill their tank (my own car would cost about $100 to fill at this price)
• Increasing fuel prices puts more emphasis on alternative fuels like ethanol, which in turn strains the global food supply
• The airline industry will fall apart, resulting in a 90% reduction in the number of airports by 2025

Unfortunately, it's all doom and gloom. Life After the Oil Crash lists the facts point after meticulous point, including the research, economics, and alternatives. And he doesn't end with anything positive.

"What can I do to prepare?"

Attempting to prepare for a catastrophe of this magnitude is daunting to say the least. What you can or will do to prepare for this situation will depend on your age, health, marital status, geographic location, financial situation and other factors too numerous to mention. About the best I can do is point you to some articles and resources you might to be profitable reading in terms of generating your own options and plans. I maintain a continually updated repository of such articles at the LATOC Prepare page.

Best of luck,

Mattthew David Savinar, Esq.

But there may be a slim upside. Savinar writes that some combination of alternative fuel sources could be used to delay the inevitable, but it's not some kind of magic bullet. And Curtis Rist wrote in Discover that natural gas can be turned into fuel, and estimates suggest that could provide up to 60 years of fuel. There have also been a couple of recent discoveries I've blogged about which will have some impact.

But the most important thing is acting now. We have to lobby our governments to support energy reduction and research into alternative energy sources.

That is, if there's any window at all to be acting in.

The Toronto Star reports on a Canadian and Japanese team that has successfully removed gas from methane hydrate. This by itself isn't news -- the gas releases itself at room temperature. What is news is how the team has managed to get a sustained flow of gas from the material, making it usable.

Heat or unsqueeze the hydrate and gas is released. Hold a core sample to your ear and it hisses.

More significant is the fact that gas hydrates concentrate 164 times the energy of the same amount of natural gas.

And gas hydrate fields are found in abundance under the coastal waters of every continent. Calculations suggest there's more energy in gas hydrates than in coal, oil and conventional gas combined.

I'm reminded of Curtis Rist's Discover article in 1999 about how we'll never run out of oil. Hilariously, oil is now more than $100 a barrel.

Discover lists 14 different distributed computing applications that use extra processor cycles for other purposes. I've been using the SETI@Home client for over 10 years, but there are other projects that are a bit more personal, like Folding@Home, FightAIDS@Home, and the Help Defeat Cancer Project.