Excellent work on picking apart the predicament our industrial society finds itself in, Nafeez. To not quite so much surprise, reading well into many comments, there’s lots of cornucopia/cargo cult believers: the market will substitute, technology will find a way, blah blah blah. Neither the market nor technology IS energy. And the vaunted technology that gave us the extra 5 mn barrels a day to produce our current glut, that is, Fracking, was only possible as a result of malinvestment brought about by the Fed’s ZIRP. The frackers have not made a single red cent in all these years! It is a junk bond boom fueled by investors who will never see their moneys back, somewhere in the vicinity of $200 billion. The effects will be felt all ‘round the economy.