Nafeez Ahmed. June 2013. Rising energy prices will challenge western way of life – MoD report. The Guardian.

Converging global trends will dramatically lower prosperity in the future.

A combination of overpopulation water and food shortages, climate change, rising energy prices, and social unrest are likely to lead to internal chaos and external wars by 2040 in South East Asia (and elsewhere).

The depletion of cheap and easily extractable oil combined with food and water shortages from climate change and population growth will result and create sustained high energy prices.

When energy and food prices spike long recessions will likely follow, resulting in social unrest and rising nationalist movements.

Oil is like to reach $500 a barrel by 2040 because of the demand for fossil fuels in China and India as well as supply volatility in the Middle East.  This competition for resources could lead to clashes.

Climate change

Climate change will worsen matters greatly from flooding, heat-waves, drought, less food production, more and stronger storms. Rising sea levels will force millions of people to move elsewhere.

Water shortages

Over 2.5 billion people will suffer from water scarcity, not only limiting growth but creating a greater chance of war within and between China, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Food shortages

Lack of food from the above factors is likely to lead to mass migration, unrest, and war as millions of people flee after rice crops fail.  The crop failure from climate change, soil erosion, and increasing pests and weeds will at first affect mainly those at or below the poverty line.

Demographic time bomb?

China and India aren’t likely to be able to continue economic growth given all of the above factors. With nearly 40% of the world’s population it will be hard for them to prevent social chaos as food and water grow scarcer.  This scenario is even more likely because of the vast numbers of uneducated people, unfair distribution of wealth, ethnic tensions, awareness that it doesn’t have to be this way via the internet, and a huge amount of inequality and corruption throughout all institutions.

End of growth due to resource price spikes?

The West too is facing a dark future — the more resources that flow to Southeast asia, the rest there is for the West to consume.

The report concludes that the “western ‘way of life’” with its large  “variety of consumer choice” and cheap energy – will be “increasingly challenged as lifestyles follow GDP levels and ‘normalise’ across the globe.”

Within the US and UK, the bulk of the populations will be affected by: “… rising energy and resource prices, and the declining availability of finance to sustain discretionary spending. In such a context, this could lead to periods of sustained recession in the West, causing increasingly protectionist policies to be adopted.”

About The Report

This report was published by the MoD’s Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) as part of its Strategic Trends Programme in January. The DCDC is an MoD think tank within the Defence Academy site at Shrivenham.  The report used data from many government agencies and departments, including the MoD’s Strategy Unit, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, the Cabinet Office, and the Foreign Office – as well as two private institutions, Standard Chartered Bank and Now & Next.

The report concedes that the “‘relative’ decline of the West is likely to lead to a new power framework where alliances are constantly reassessed and negotiated.” This will also see “the declining influence of existing international institutions such as NATO and the UN Security Council.”

In this context, the report predicts an accelerating coalescence between nation states and global capital, noting that: “The line between government, and private industry protection of intellectual property of key technologies for security and wealth creation, may become increasingly blurred… [as] blueprints, patents and formulas will be increasingly seen as the foundations of wealth generation.”

The report echoes themes highlighted in a previous MoD global trends study, which warned in 2010: “Pressure on resources, climate change, population increases and the changing distribution of power are likely to result in increased instability and likelihood of armed conflict.”

If anything, this year’s DCDC study reveals not just the latest strategic thinking informing British security policy behind the scenes, but also the undoubtedly grim consequences of continuing business as usual.

Remember the term “peak oil”? With all the oil now available from oil shale, tar sands, and other new sources, many analysts assume that the old talk of peak oil has been proven dead wrong.

The optimists believe that our energy problems have been largely solved. I wouldn’t bet on that. The real issue with oil isn’t how much we have or even whether we can continue to increase production.

Rather, what really matters is the cost of resources, in terms of resources required, including energy resources, to keep producing oil.  On that front, the U.S. is losing ground at an alarming pace.

Simply put, it takes energy to get energy. In today’s world, it takes rising amounts of energy to get all the new energy sources out of the ground and ready to use.

The critical concept is “energy return on investment,” or EROI. This means the amount of energy obtained from each unit of energy invested. When oil first began to flow, its EROI was around 100, according to State University of New York professor Charles Hall. Drillers would use one barrel to extract 100 barrels from the ground. As more wells were drilled and producers added infrastructure, the EROI ratio dropped. New wells over time grew less productive, further decreasing EROI. In the early 1950s the EROI associated with refined oil products like gasoline was about 20.  Today, it takes about one barrel of conventional U.S. oil to produce the equivalent of nine barrels, or 378 gallons of gasoline.

Meanwhile, the EROI for nonconventional oil, that is, oil produced from shale and tar sands, stands even lower, at about four. For every barrel of oil used to drill, producers obtain only four barrels of nonconventional oil, or 168 gallons of gasoline.

The lower the EROI, the less energy can be made available for the economy. If EROI were one, the economy would be channeling all energy produced into making energy. In other words, it would be curtains for our civilization.

SUNY professor Hall estimates that for an industrial society to function and grow, EROI should measure at least five to nine. Oil from tar sands and shale does not make that cut.

It’s telling that, based on 12-month averages, oil prices today are only some 5% below their all-time peaks, although, according to the Energy Information Agency, per capita consumption of oil has decreased 17% from its 2007 high. Why don’t we see a larger price decline? Economics 101 would suggest that greater supply coupled with lower demand should produce tumbling prices. That isn’t happening, since we funnel much of the extra oil made available by lower demand and rising production into oil production itself.

What explains the significantly lower EROI of non-conventional energy sources? To understand, we must realize that all resources are inextricably interconnected, and also require energy to produce. We can’t overlook the reality that drilling apparatus and infrastructure needed to extract oil from shale also demand large quantities of steel, derived from iron ore, whose production and refinery in turn require energy.

Huge energy costs are also inherent in the transport of water, chemicals and other materials essential to fracking.

Tar sands likewise require mining equipment whose manufacture and transport consume still more energy. Mining tar sands, moreover, also uses natural gas.

These added costs appear on the balance sheets of banks, where oil and gas lending is the fastest-growing category. Indeed, according to Schlumberger SLB, the industry’s capital expenditures for oil and gas have grown by about 12% annually over the last decade. Oil and gas production grew less than 2% a year in the same period. Clearly the more money and resources needed to maintain adequate production of oil and gas, the less money and resources available for other endeavors.

One vicious cycle playing out in America starts with the consumer, who has had to cut back on energy use.

• Less energy translates into less mobility, less shopping, and in general fewer consumer expenditures.
• Fewer consumer expenditures mean less demand and more pressure on corporations, which are also squeezed by higher resource costs.
• Wages in turn get squeezed, but resource prices remain high, and the vicious circle is completed.
• It is no surprise that this century has seen a 10% decline in real median income, which when measured in time and depth is probably the most protracted on record.

Things may be even worse than that, however. EROI refers to how much energy is needed to produce more energy. The concept leaves out a lot of linkages among resources.

• Resource-intensive production of oil and gas increases the scarcity and costs of other resources such as water and therefore of food, which depends on water as well.
• Other resources such as copper and iron ore that use lots of water and energy are also squeezed, and you have another vicious, potentially catastrophic, cycle.

It would take me too far afield to focus on all these interrelationships, but an examination of the more general concept of resource return on investment, or RROI, would probably find the U.S. in a lot worse shape than as measured only by EROI, or the amount of energy required to get more energy.

Chris Nelder, in Watts Up, Vaclav? writes:

It takes just 35 rigs operating in conventional fields in Kuwait to produce 2 million barrels a day of oil, while in Texas, it now takes 800 rigs in the Eagle Ford to produce the same amount. The gradual shift to increasingly poor sources is also why domestic oil extraction used to return more than 100 kilojoules of energy per kilojoule invested in the 1930s, but only returns between 11 and 18 kilojoules today.

Industrial agriculture is responsible for 24% of greenhouse gas emissions (methane from livestock, fertilizers release nitrous oxide, machinery releases CO2, cutting down rainforests and draining wetlands increases CO2, and so on).  Trying to double agriculture would drastically increase climate change.

And already, climate change is reducing crop yields from drought, extreme storms, flooding, and lack of freshwater from over pumping nonrenewable ground water to grow food.  In the future, rising oceans will flood a great deal of highly productive farmland.

Agriculture also uses up 70% of fresh water, and the nutrient runoff from fertilizers creates dead zones that kills of all the fish, shrimp, shellfish, and so on, reducing food even further.  Yet meanwhile, growing populations will need more fresh water to survive.

In the Nafeez Ahmed Guardian’s article “Peak Soil: industrial civilisation is on the verge of eating itself: New research on land, oil, bees and climate change points to imminent global food crisis without urgent action” they cite additional reasons and suggest that food production might do down far sooner than the report mentioned above:

Over the past 40 years, about 2 billion hectares of soil – equivalent to 15% of the Earth’s land area (an area larger than the United States and Mexico combined) – have been degraded through human activities, and about 30% of the world’s cropland have become unproductive. But it takes on average a whole century just to generate a single millimetre of topsoil lost to erosion.

Soil is therefore, effectively, a non-renewable but rapidly depleting resource.

We are running out of time. Within just 12 years, the report says, conservative estimates suggest that high water stress will afflict all the main food basket regions in North and South America, west and east Africa, central Europe and Russia, as well as the Middle East, south and south-east Asia.

Unfortunately, though, the report overlooks another critical factor – the inextricable link between oil and food. Over the last decade, food and fuel prices have been heavily correlated. This is no accident.

Last week, a new World Bank report examining five different food commodities – corn, wheat, rice, soybean, and palm oil – confirmed that oil prices are the biggest contributor to rising food prices. The report, based on a logarithm designed to determine the impact of any given factor through regression analysis, concluded that oil prices were even more significant than the ratio of available world food stocks relative to consumption levels, or commodity speculation. The Bank thus recommends controlling oil price movements as a key to tempering food price inflation.

The oil-food price link comes as no surprise. A University of Michigan study points out that every major point in the industrial food system – chemical fertilisers, pesticides, farm machinery, food processing, packaging and transportation – is dependent on high oil and gas inputs. Indeed, 19% of the fossil fuels that prop up the American economy go to the food system, second only to cars.

But high oil prices are here to stay – and according to a UK Ministry of Defence assessment this year, could rise as high as $500 per barrel over the next 30 years.

All this points to a rapidly approaching convergence point between an increasingly self-defeating industrial food system, and an inexorably expanding global population.

But the point of convergence could come far sooner due to the wild card that is the catastrophic decline in honeybees.

Some of the points made:

Most commodity prices are now 2 or even 3 times higher compared to a decade earlier.

From 1997 to 2012 the nominal prices of energy, fertilizers, and precious metals tripled, metal prices went up by more than 150%, and most food prices doubled

Read more about it:

24 May 2013.  Much Ado about Phosphorus.

4 Dec 2012. Henry Blodget and Rob Wile. A Genius Investor Thinks Billions Of People Are Going To Starve To Death — Here’s Why. Business Insider.

20 Apr 2010. James Elser. Peak Phosphorus. It’s an essential, if underappreciated component of our daily lives, and a key link in the global food chain. And it’s running out. Foreign Policy.

3 Apr 2008. Hallie Woods. World’s phosphorus situation scares some scientists. The Coloradan.

25 Dec 2007. Jeremy Faludi.   Your Stuff: If It Isn’t Grown, It Must Be Mined. WorldChanging

Cumulative groundwater depletion in the Central Valley of California, 1900 through 2008

California grows a third of America’s food, so what happens here affects everyone.

California lost nearly 145 cubic kilometers of groundwater since 1880, with a fifth of that water disappearing in just 9 years from 2000 to 2008 (31.4 km3).

In parts of the San Joaquin Valley and Tulare Basin, water levels had declined nearly 400 feet, depleting groundwater from storage and lowering water levels to as much as 100 feet below sea level. Long-term water-level records in some wells indicate that water levels were already declining at substantial rates when water levels were first observed as early as the 1930s. The extensive groundwater pumping caused changes to the groundwater flow system, changes in water levels, changes in aquifer storage, and widespread land subsidence in the San Joaquin Valley, which began in the 1920s.

The thickness of sediments comprising the freshwater parts of the aquifer averages about 3000 feet in the San Joaquin Valley and 1500 feet in the Sacramento Valley. The shallow part of the aquifer system is unconfined, whereas the deeper part is semi-confined or confined
References

Konikow, L.F., 2013, Groundwater depletion in the United States (1900−2008): U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2013−5079, 63 p., http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2013/5079.

Cumulative groundwater depletion in the High Plains aquifer 1900-2008

• Has declined as much as 164 feet in some places.
• 337 km3 total depletion since 1900.

According to the USGS Groundwater Depletion in the United States 1900-2008:

• Groundwater depletion in the United States between 1900–2008 was 240 cubic miles (1,000 cubic km3).
• That’s twice as much water in Lake Erie (480 km3).
• For many areas the rate is unsustainable
• This rate increased dramatically after 1950
• The consumption rate nearly tripled from 2000-2008 over past rates.  Some of this was due to drought and decreased snowmelt.
• In 2000-2008 about 25% of all water taken during the previous century was removed. This large volume of depletion represents a serious problem in the United States because much of this storage loss cannot be easily or quickly recovered and affects the sustainability of some critical water supplies and base flow to streams, among other effects
• The Ogallala aquifer won’t be replenished until after the next ice age and underlies 10 states (175,000 square miles). It is the main source of drinking and agricultural water. In 2000-2008, as much water was taken out as during the entire previous century from 1900 to 1999.
• Another dark side to depleting aquifers is that the extra water runs into the ocean and adds 2% of the global sea-level rise seen so far. 
  

Map of the United States showing cumulative groundwater depletion 1900-2008 in 40 assessed aquifer systems or subareas. Colors are hatched in the Dakota aquifer (area 39) where the aquifer overlaps with other aquifers having different values of depletion (page 16).

Cumulative groundwater depletion in the United States and major aquifer systems or categories, 1900 through 2008

Decadal scale rate of groundwater depletion in the United States, 1900 through 2008. Final value represents average rate during an 8-year period, 2001 through 2008.

Agricultural and Land Drainage in the United States

During the 20th century, many agricultural and civil engineering projects were completed for land reclamation, flood control, and agricultural drainage purposes in the United States. This led to significant losses of wetland areas throughout the Nation. On farms, crop yields can be increased by keeping the water table some distance below the land surface, thereby precluding waterlogging of land and allowing salts to be removed from the soil profile. Drainage projects can result in permanently lowered water-table elevations both locally and regionally. Where the seasonal or average annual position of the water table is permanently lowered, the net decline represents a long-term depletion of the volume of groundwater in storage below the land surface.

The first half of the 20th century was marked by emerging technologies for land drainage. Farmers joined together in drainage organizations to build drainage and flood control measures. Large-scale drainage projects backed by drainage organizations and Federal agencies affected both large and small wetland areas. Agricultural and urban expansion persisted throughout the United States. Use of drained lands usually occurred in a succession, from undrained wetlands to agricultural lands to urban areas. These factors led to the drainage of over 100,000 square miles of wetlands in the lower 48 states during the 20th century, which is about 55 km3 of permanently lost water.

A great deal is known about wildfires in the East Bay hills.

After every major fire (there have been 15 major wildfires between 1923 and 1992), a blue ribbon commission was appointed and produced excellent reports on what needed to be done.  We know from the 1982 and 1995 commission reports that the eucalyptus, pine, and acacia have to be removed, how to go about it, and which native species to replace them with.  Native oaks, redwoods, and other trees are far less fire-prone, and when they do burn, create far less catastrophic fires.

There has also been an extremely knowledgeable and hardworking wildfire prevention district since 1991.

The Claremont Canyon conservancy has an excellent website about the history of wildfire in our area and what needs to be done.  They’ve teamed up with professors and wildfire experts at the University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, and other institutions to try to prevent wildfires in the future:

Many of the people in my neighborhood now moved in after the 1991 wildfire that burned down 3500 homes.  Those of us who lived through it never want to see it happen again.  You will spend up to five years fighting the insurance company to get paid (see my book review of “Delay, Deny, Defend” for details at http://www.amazon.com/review/R2QU1EU62P2QXU), and at least two years to get your house rebuilt and furnished.

Back in 1991, dozens of us had gone through CORE training in the Rockridge Terrace area, many of us all the way through CORE IV, and so we knew we needed to get out.  Perhaps that’s one of the reasons no one died in our neighborhood.  But we lost 97 of 100 homes on Contra Costa Road, and many more homes on Buena Vista and Golden Gate avenue as well.

History of wildfires in East Bay Hills

Between 1923 and 1992, 15 major wildfires occurred in the East Bay Hills of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, California.

• These 15 fires burned about 9,000 acres, destroyed more than 3,500 homes, and killed 26 people.

• Among these fires, the 1923 Berkeley Fire destroyed over 600 homes in an hour.

• The 1970 fire consumed over 200 acres and burned 37 homes.

• The 1991 Tunnel Fire killed 25 people, destroyed approximately 3,400 homes and did an estimated $1.5 billion in damages.

Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus trees are the largest problem.  They have oily bark and leaves which can aerodynamically spread fires one to six miles ahead of the main flame front, and as far as 18 miles ahead (Cheney 1981, McCaw, L. et al. 1992, Stretton 1939).

That’s why our homes burned down in 1991 – eucalyptus can easily jump 8 lanes of freeway plus Lake Temescal.

Eucalyptus are the most likely kind of tree to cause the worst possible kind of fire — a crown fire, which travels three to eight times as fast as a ground fire.  And crown fires cause the worst spotting, exploding with firebrands, as happened in the Oakland hills fire of 1991 where the “wide dispersal of firebrands contributed significantly to the rapid and extensive spread of the fire” (Bradley 1995).

Eucalyptus are especially prone to crown fire because their bark and leaves are imbued with flammable oils that ignite easily, and the shape of the tree — an open crown — creates updrafts which lift the fiery bark and ground litter up into the hanging branches (USDA Forest Service).

Another reason to get rid of eucalyptus is that they evolved to not only cope well with fire, but are so good at it, that after a fire, their range spreads.  They are the most adapted to fire of any tree in the world, that’s why Australia is covered with them.   Many species of trees in Australia can only exist where it’s too wet for wildfires or too cold for eucalyptus to survive.

Eucalyptus trees poison the soil with terpenes and phenolic acids that make it hard for other plants to grow.  There’s very little, if any, understory vegetation in eucalyptus stands in California (USDA). So even if you get rid of a eucalyptus tree, one is likely to come back in that spot.

I think a good monster movie could be made with eucalyptus as the villain.  They are awfully hard to kill.  They have four different ways of reproducing if burned or cut down: heat-resistant seed capsules, sprouting from the stump, sprouting from the lignotuber, or sprouting from the roots (USDA).

I’ve been a naturalist for 50 years, and volunteer to take inner city children on hikes at Audubon Canyon Ranch.  I’ve hiked thousands of miles of Bay Area trails.  One thing I’ve always noticed is how silent, dead, eucalyptus groves are.  Nothing moves and nothing lives there. This is because eucalyptus is not native, so very few of the local species can use them for food or homes (1995 Fire Hazard Mitigation Program).

Worse yet, eucalyptus can harm native species. Many birds are coated with a tarry pitch when they seek nectar.  In Australia, birds have evolved nostrils far away from their bills to cope, here bird nostrils can get clogged, killing the bird from suffocation, according to Rich Stallcup of PRBO conservation science.

In closing, I’d like to remind you that in Australia, eucalyptus has always been, and always will be a scourge.   In 1976, one in ten rural Australians was part of a volunteer bush fire brigade.

Let’s not let eucalyptus take over the ecology of California, or we’ll have fires like the Ash Wednesday fire in South Australia, 1983, that burned 1350 square miles and killed 71 people.  Fire tornadoes rose 410 yards into the air. Survivors described the sound of the fire burning as a “deafening metallic roar that was terrifying and disorienting”.  The smoke was so thick and the fire so fast, escape routes couldn’t be seen and were cut off.  Water pumps stopped working as the fire severed electric lines.

References

1982 “Report of the blue ribbon urban interface fire prevention committee”.

1995 “Fire Hazard Mitigation Program & Fuel Management Plan for the East Bay Hills”

Bradley, Gordon A. 1995. “Urban Forest Landscapes: Integrating Multidisciplinary Perspectives.”  University of Washington Press.

Cheney, N.P. 1981. Fire Behaviour. In “Fire and the Australian Biota.” Editors A.M. Gill, R.H. Groves & I.R. Noble. Australian Academy of Science. Canberra pp 151-176

FEMA project Fact Sheet. april 1, 2013. East Bay Hills Hazardous Fire Risk Reduction Environmental Impact Statement (EIS)

National Park Service.  september 2006. “Managing Eucalyptus”

U.S. Department of the Interior. Golden Gate National Recreation Area

McCaw, L. et al. 1992. Extreme wildfire behaviour in 3-year-old fuels in a Western Australian mixed Eucalyptus forest. Western Australian Dept. of Conservation and Land Management, Manjimup)

O’Brien, Bill.  2005. Ubiquitous Eucalyptus. “How an Aussie Got Naturalized”. Bay Nature

Pyne, Stephen J. 1991. “Burning Bush. A Fire History of Australia”. Henry Holt.

Stretton, Leonard. E. B.   Royal Commissioner Judge describing the 1939 “Black Friday” fire that consumed millions of acres in Australia

“The speed of the 1939 fire as apalling…lighting forests 6 or 7 miles in advance of the main fires…balls of crackling fire sped at a great pace in advance of the fires, consuming with a roaring, explosive noice, all that they touched.  Great pieces of burning bark were carried by the wind to set in raging flame regions not yet reached by the fires.

USDA FOREST SERVICE. Fire effects information page

http://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/eucglo/all.html#BOTANICAL%20AND%20ECOLOGICAL%20CHARACTERISTICS

I think the end of fossil fuels and all that they enable us to do, microchips, and global supply chains has a 95-98% chance of saving us from extinction because:

1. Carbon dioxide and methane will start to go down due to peak oil and coal (Hart, Heinberg, Höök, Nel, Patzek) and natural gas Shale Oil and Gas Will Not Save Us.

2.  Gail Tverberg in Oil Limits and Climate Change: “My estimate of CO2 generation by fossil fuels in the 21st century is only about one-quarter of the amount (range midpoint) assumed in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report.”

3. Our ability to do any kind of harm to any resource will diminish drastically once oil and oil equivalent fuels diminish because so many large vehicles and any other equipment with combustion engines won’t operate any more:

• farm tractors will no longer compress and erode topsoil (or grow enough food to feed 7+ billion people)
• earth moving machines will no longer harvest coal and other minerals and metals
• our roads, bridges, airports, and docks will last less than 100 years because we didn’t build anything with cement to last over a century (unlike Roman cement, which is still going strong). We won’t have the energy to rebuild or maintain most of our infrastructure
• It will be much harder to chop down (rain)forests with roads crumbling and large trucks gone
• There won’t be ships that can go to the ends of the earth to harvest the last schools of fish. Marine reserves have often restored fish populations faster than anyone expected.
• due to lack of fuel, future world wars or world war on the scale of WWI & II will not be possible.  Wars will be far more local, more like pre-WWI.
• Although biodiversity loss will probably increase initially as anyone with a gun goes out hunting, that’s likely to change because the people who live where hunters can get to on foot or bicycle will defend their territory.   The same goes for fishing and foraging.

3. The book “The Earth Without Us” gives me great hope that the earth will recover rather rapidly.

4. In 2075 when sea levels start to rise, so many people will have already died off from the decline in fossil fuels that there will be plenty of room for coastal dwellers to move to

5. The loss of our ability to make microchips and breakdown in supply chains will be nearly as important as the loss of oil in rapidly changing civilization back to wood-based energy, and also increase the rate and numbers of people dying.

I don’t want to diminish the suffering and tragedy of between 3 and 7 billion people dying, of climate change wreaking harm for thousands of years, and the loss of much of the amazing scientific understanding we have of the world since so much of it is being preserved digitally instead of on a more permanent physical substance (i.e. imprinted on thin metal sheets, etc).

Even though even a small nuclear war would kill over 1 billion people, and a nuclear EMP even more, the ozone would recover after 5 years, many people around the equator will be fine, others will have stockpiled enough food to get by.

All of the 9 planetary boundaries will diminish as human population declines from lack of fossil fuels.  Peak phosphorous will come even sooner without fossil-fuel driven vehicles and equipment to harvest and transport it.

This is too big a topic to list every factor and how it might turn out as you can see from the menu items in Decline and Collapse at energyskeptic.com.  Yes, extinction is a possibility if too many of these happen at once over just a few centuries.

But since both human population and energy resources are likely to decline exponentially rather quickly, we won’t be able to do the harm we are now, to the planet or ourselves, and that has a good chance of saving us from extinction.

Alice Friedemann

References

Hart, Phil. 15 Nov 2010. Oil Demand to Decline in the West, according to International Energy Agency.  http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/7114

Heinberg, R., Fridley, D. The end of cheap coal. New forecasts suggest that coal reserves will run out faster than many believe. Nature 468, 367-369 (18 November 2010) doi:10.1038/468367a

Höök, M., Sivertsson, A. & Aleklett, K. “Validity of the fossil fuel production outlooks in the IPCC Emission Scenarios” Natural Resources Research, 2010, Vol. 19, Issue 2: 63-81

Nel and Cooper (2009) Implications of fossil fuel constraints on economic growth and global warming, Energy Policy 37: 166-180.

Patzek, T, Croft, G. A global coal production forecast with multi-Hubbert cycle analysis.  Energy 35 (2010) 3109e3122