When Peak Oil Meets Global Warming

Crude oil prices rose to nearly $88 a barrel after Turkey approved a military incursion into Kurdish Iraq yesterday, which is just one reason why Jeremy Leggett's ideas about peak oil and global warming are getting attention.

Leggett is a one-time oil industry consultant and Greenpeace activist turned head of a U.K. solar electric company, who will take his talk "Half Gone: Peak Oil Meets Climate Change" to Dublin soon, according to the Irish Times.

His argument: The depletion of oil reserves will trigger massive price spikes and a worldwide recession, setting the stage for the rise of new alternative energies as global warming's effects become unmistakable in the weather.

Peak Oil is a theory, and analysts describe Peak Oil as the point when the world has effectively pumped half of what is available, when the rest comes at greater expense, and a yawning gap emerges between supply and demand.

Legget thinks we'll be there in three years, and that it will set off an economic catalclysm every bit as severe as the Great Depression. And, of course, global warming will not help the world economic cause, as it demands disaster relief, sea wall construction, disease treatment and other economic inputs.

Which is why he advocates for huge government investments in renewable energy source (like solar, hint hint) that can offset the decline in oil without contributing greenhouse gases that fuel global warming. And we know that such an investment would help the job outlook, and not just for a certain solar power executive.

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