This is a guest post by Chris Clugston. Chris has spent over 30 years working with information technology sector companies in marketing, sales, finance, M&A, and general management—the last twenty as a corporate chief executive and management consultant. Chris received an AB/Political Science, Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Penn State University, and an MBA/Finance with High Distinction from Temple University in Philadelphia, PA.

Energy is the “enabling” resource; most, if not all other natural and manmade resources and their capacities to sustain human life are derived from or dependent upon one or more sources of primary energy. The fact that the amount of energy available to human beings is subject to a limit—global peak energy—has profound implications for future human population levels and living standards.

Given humanity’s unquestioned dependence upon energy for survival, answers to the following questions are critical to our long term success as a species:

• When and at what level will global energy “peak”?
• What are the implications of global peak energy for the world’s human population?

The following analysis represents my initial attempt to answer these questions; the primary conclusions are unsettling, but clear: Based on publicly available data, global peak energy will probably occur between the years 2025 and 2030; total available energy will decline continuously thereafter.