Modern energy in general and oil in specific is what separates our contemporary world from the preindustrial. It separates what we define as "civilization" from what came before. . . .
Without oil, the American-led global Order would have never had a chance. Nor would have passenger cars. Or global food distribution. Or global manufacturing. Or modern health care. Or the shoes most of us are wearing. Oil's power is such that in many ways, it has almost enabled us to ignore nothing less than geography itself. . . .
Oil is different. Because oil is central to everything from the shingles on your roof to the phone in your hand to the spatula in your kitchen to the pipes and hoses in your plumbing to the diapers on your kid to the paint on your walls to your daily commute to how products cross the ocean, a slight increase in demand for oil or a slight decrease in supply for oil results in wild price swings that are most assuredly not proportional. . . .
The specifics will be as wild and unpredictable as the rest of the post-Order chaos, but a good starting point is to assume that 40 percent of global supplies fall into the Kashagan-style bucket: too-dangerous export routes to survive globalization's end, too-expensive projects to maintain without outside financing, too difficult technically to operate without an army of out-of-region workers. Such projects will go away and not come back for decades. If ever. And oil's absence for a few weeks, never mind a few decades, would be more than enough to crash modern civilization as we know it.
-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization
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