"Peak oil" theorists: World running out: The group, meeting in Denver this week, wants immediate steps to avert economic ruin.

The world is running out of oil faster than society suspects, and last year's $4.11 gasoline spike was just a bitter hint of the future, according to a "peak oil" theory whose key proponents will gather in Denver this week.

Though peak-oil theorists prompt scorn from many in the petroleum industry, they've attracted an audience in some political and financial circles with their warnings to avert disaster by conserving, diversifying and exploring at an urgent pace.

"Up until now, technology has delivered dazzling results to America and the world economy, in delivering oil from all around the world despite increasingly challenging environments," said Dave Bowden, executive director of the Denver-based Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas-USA, or ASPO. "The harsh reality is, despite the best efforts of amazing technology, they're not finding as many of these big fields anymore."

Capturing a Nation’s Thirst for Energy

Mitch Epstein has taken his 8-by-10 view camera across the United States to document the energy needed to support the American way of life. Though he says he did not start out with an ideological agenda, Mr. Epstein offers a quiet but unsettling view of 21st-century America’s dependency on electrical power.

In Saturday’s Arts section of The Times, Randy Kennedy reports on Mr. Epstein’s journey and on the photographs in his book “American Power,” to be published later this month by Steidl.

Tracing the Path of the Oil Industry's Sins

We tend to take for granted the comforts of modern life. Few of us think of underpaid migrant workers when we buy inexpensive imported clothes from China, or of disfigured Appalachian mountain tops when we turn on our coal-powered kitchen lights, or of fouled oil-rich frontiers when we hop in our cars.

In his new book, "Crude World," journalist Peter Maass takes readers on a vivid tour of troubled oil frontiers, voyaging to places like Nigeria's polluted delta, Equatorial Guinea's dusty capital, Ecuador's scarred rain forest and Russia's corporate boardrooms, where corruption is rife and environmental neglect all too common. It is a disturbing catalogue of the underside of the international oil industry.

"Though oil provides fuel for our cars and warmth for our homes, it undermines most countries that possess it and, along with natural gas and coal, poisons the climate," Maass writes.

Richard Heinberg: Our Evanescent Culture and the Awesome Duty of Librarians

How secure is our civilization’s accumulated knowledge?

It is a question that, in a fundamental sense, transcends many life-and-death concerns (threats of sickness, natural disaster, or military invasion) that prompt us collectively to spend fortunes on insurance, health care, and weaponry. We know that we each individually will die, though we are willing to go to great lengths to delay the event as long as possible. But we have an overarching shared interest that the world of ideas will go on without us: that our descendants will continue to compose music, invent tools, refine scientific knowledge, and write histories, extending into the indefinite future the cumulative, constantly evolving universe of signs, symbols, and skills that have enriched our lives. Cultural death—the passing of the wisdom, artistic creations, and practical knowledge of an entire people, painstakingly built up over many generations—is a loss almost too wrenching to contemplate.

Yet cultural death happens. The examples from history are legion. Anthropologists and archaeologists have identified well over 10,000 distinct human cultures, of which most have perished, many by absorption into one multi-ethnic civilization or another. Linguists have catalogued over 6,000 human languages; again, most are extinct or endangered, often for a similar reason—absorption of indigenous populations into multi-ethnic urban civilizations. But civilizations are also mortal: about 24 are known to have existed over the past 5,000 years, and again most are now dust.