An even better question is: What do we do now?

Now that the world's supply has peaked and started the inevitable slide toward "out of."

Every expert agrees that oil consumption is going to increase from 80 million barrels a day (mbd) to at least 120 mbd within the next ten years. But with aging oil fields, it's quite possible that supply will drop down to 75 mbd by 2015. If that happens, oil prices will explode, throwing all of our "cheap oil" civilizations out of whack.

When did the crisis start and when will it end?

It is now believed that the oil crisis started around Thanksgiving 2005, when the world’s second largest oil field, Kuwait's Burgan, peaked out and output began dropping, surprising energy experts (who now realize they had been relying on falsely optimistic data). This came on the heels of the surprising decline of Mexico's largest oil field. Then Indonesia, an OPEC member, became a net oil importer for the first time.

Worse yet, there is increasing belief that the Saudis have been lying about the size of their reserves, just as Shell Oil did before its big oil reserve scandal made the headlines.

Are there any solutions in the next ten years?

What everyone seems to be pointing toward is atomic energy as the solution. There are already 441 atomic reactors in the world churning out energy in the USA, France, China, India and many other countries. France, China and India are moving toward massive reactor building programs.

But there's one big catch: We seem to be running out of uranium as fast as we're running out of oil. It seems we've already mined the best grades of uranium, just as we've nearly exhausted the supply of light sweet crude, the highest grade of oil.

• Beijing intends to build two huge nuclear reactors every year from now until 2020. This will increase China's uranium needs from 3 million pounds a year to 18 million pounds by 2020.
• India will consumer 4 million pounds a year, up from the current one million.
• Russia produces only one-fifth of the 17,600 pounds of uranium it consumes each year. (Last year it even drew on its reserves, found largely in old warheads.) Putting even more stress on the world's uranium shortage, Russia intends to build 40 new nuclear reactors.
• At this time, the world consumes 176 million pounds of uranium a year. By 2020, it could reach 230 million.

The next ten years will see a huge uranium shortage.

The price could explode from $40.62 a pound to over $250 a pound, which would raise the world's uranium bill from $7 billion a year to over $56 billion.

Even worse, the world would be using increasingly lower grades of uranium, requiring more energy for refining and producing reduced energy outputs.

And then, of course, we will confront the environmental nightmare of disposing of the radioactive waste coming out of the reactors.

The experts think atomic energy will be a big part of our future.

Then again, similar experts were claiming that we would never run out of oil.

What do we do in the next ten years, facing huge supply and demand gaps in both oil and uranium?

• Conservation. Extreme conservation.
• Public transportation instead of cars.
• Railroads instead of trucks.
• McCottage instead of McMansion.
• Walking instead of riding.
• Mending instead of buying.

When energy goes from "cheap" to "luxury," everything will change.

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