The situation is not so bad, and, indeed, cannot get so bad that we will fundamentally stay at home all the time.

Unfortunately, we've been working with bad numbers and it's become clear that our ability to extract oil at 86 million barrels a day is coming to an end.

Peak oil discovery was in 1963. Since then we have been finding less oil every decade than the decade before. We have been drawing down our reserves and we're now at the halfway point of the easy-to-extract oil. As production declines, the economy will be sent into a tailspin and we'll soon have wave after wave of unemployed. This happens in every oil shock and makes sense when you consider that every $10 increase in the price of a barrel of oil means $76 billion is removed from the U.S. economy.

World GDP growth has been lowered by the World bank four times in the last five months and will soon go negative (it's now pegged at about 1%.) U.S. GDP growth is already negative but it won't show up in the numbers for another few months.

If you think the situation with oil is something that won't have a lasting impact on us, I recommend that you do some research.

Try this page for a start:
www.postpeakliving.com/peak-oil-primer

Then take the UnCrash Course and start getting ready. This is a very different world we're moving into.

-André