Peak to Decline

Peak to Decline

By Dr Arvind Kumar

Many experts have suggested that humankind has achieved an unsustainable pinnacle of population size and consumption rates, and that the road ahead will be mostly downhill—at least for the next few

decades, until human species learn to live within Earth’s resource limits. The industrial expansion of the past century or two was mainly due to increased use of the concentrated energies of cheap fossil fuels; and that as oil, coal, and natural gas cease to be cheap and abundant, economic growth will phase into contraction. It can be observed that world oil production was at, or very nearly at its peak, and that the imminent decline in extraction rates will be decisive, because global transport is nearly all oil-dependent, and there is currently no adequate substitute for petroleum. Indeed, the shift from growth to contraction will impact every aspect of human existence—financial systems, food systems, global trade—at both the macro and micro levels, threatening even our personal psychological coping mechanisms.

Nothing has happened in the past three years to change that outlook—but much has transpired to confirm it. Seemingly, there has begun a scary descent from the giddy heights of consumption achieved in the early years of this century. Of course, everything has peaked with the most glaring exception of human population, which continues to grow and is virtually certain to pass the seven billion mark very soon. Recent years have witnessed world changing in a fundamental way and the reverberations of this change will continue for decades to come.