"The world energy crisis is now driving the economies of the world nations. Presently there is an escalating worldwide demand for electrical power and transportation, much of which depends on fossil fuels and particularly oil or oil products. The resulting demand for oil is expected to increase year by year. Recent sharp rises in some U.S. metropolitan areas included gasoline at more than $2.50 per gallon already.

*At the same time, it appears that world availability of oil may have peaked in early 2000, if one factors in the suspected Arab inflation of reported oil reserves. From now on it appears that oil availability will steadily decline, slowly at first but then at an increasing pace."

"The transfer of manufacturing and production to many of these nations is a transfer to essentially "slave labor" nations where workers have few if any benefits, are paid extremely low wages, work long hours, and have no unions or bargaining rights. The local politicians can usually be "bought" very cheaply so that there are also no effective government controls. This has set up a de facto return to the feudalistic capitalism of an earlier era when enormous profits could be and were extracted from the backs of impoverished workers, and government checks and balances were nil."

"Bluntly, we foresee these factors ­ and others { } not covered ­ converging to a catastrophic collapse of the world economy in about eight years. As the collapse of the Western economies nears, one may expect catastrophic stress on the 160 developing nations as the developed nations are forced to dramatically curtail orders."

"History bears out that desperate nations take desperate actions. Prior to the final economic collapse, the stress on nations will have increased the intensity and number of their conflicts, to the point where the arsenals of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) now possessed by some 25 nations, are almost certain to be released. As an example, suppose a starving North Korea { } launches nuclear weapons upon Japan and South Korea, including US forces there, in a spasmodic suicidal response."

"The resulting great Armageddon will destroy civilization as we know it, and perhaps most of the biosphere, at least for many decades.

My personal estimate is that ... beginning about 2007 ... on our present energy course we will have reached an 80% probability of this 'final destruction of civilization itself' scenario occurring at any time, with the probability slowly increasing as time passes. One may argue about the timing, slide the dates a year or two, etc., but the basic premise and general time frame holds. We face not only a world economic crisis, but also a world destruction crisis."

"The 2003 date appears to be the critical "point of no return" for the survival of civilization as we have known it. Reaching that point, say, in 2005 will not solve the crisis in time, and the collapse of the world economy as well as the destruction of civilization and the biosphere will still almost certainly occur, even with the solutions in hand. ... Eerily, this very threat now looms in our not too distant future, due in large part to the increasing and unbearable stresses that escalating oil prices will elicit. So about seven years or so from now, we will enter the period of the threat of the Final Armageddon, unless we do something very, very quickly now, to totally and permanently solve the present "electrical energy from oil crisis."

"To avoid the impending collapse of the world economy and/or the destruction of civilization and the biosphere, we must quickly replace much of the "electrical energy from oil" heart of the crisis at great speed, and simultaneously replace a significant part of the "transportation using oil products" factor also. ... In the name of all humanity, let us begin! Else by the time this first decade of the new millennium ends, much of humanity may not remain to see the second decade."