Public discourse these days focuses a lot of attention on issues of immediate interest to many Americans: high and rising gasoline prices, rising food prices, overly expensive health care, war in Iraq and other troubles in the Middle East, terrorism and illegal immigration, and global warming. I believe many, if not all, of these issues are related and are actually symptoms of a critical problem predicted for decades and now coming to pass.

In 1956 M. King Hubbert, a geophysicist employed by Shell Development Company, presented a study to the American Petroleum Institute entitled "Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels". In his study he presented a new way to forecast the longevity of any natural resource, predicting that its production history would describe a bell-shaped curve on a graph of production volume versus time. He analyzed crude oil, natural gas, and coal for the United States alone and for the world. He updated this study about ten years later for the Committee on Resources and Man of the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, and their findings were published in 1969 in a book entitled Resources and Man.