Nobody enjoys an economic crisis, apart from the vulture professions of liquidators and receivers, the undertakers of the business world. But the current crisis is not only the worst since the 1930s. It also comes at the worst possible time. And for two reasons. The first is that governments are borrowing heavily from the future to support economic activity now. Funds are being channelled particularly into the automobile and banking industries, largely to compensate for past failings in terms of strategy and regulation. Public deficits are ballooning. The margin for manoeuvre is tightening for the years to come and little of what is being done now will help us through the massive structural change we will have to make over the coming decade. The bet is that recovery will arrive in the next year or two, allowing debts to be repaid. But what if recovery does not come? What if today’s economic crisis drags on for years, even decades?

The flustered retort of conventional wisdom is that this kind of thing has never happened in the past. Market economies have always rebounded from recession with renewed growth. Well perhaps so, but growth in industrial economies was underwritten throughout the past couple of centuries by cheap energy, largely fossil fuels. This era has now come to an end. Don’t be fooled by the collapse of the price of crude since the middle of 2008. This is the result of the slowdown in economic activity and the bursting of a speculative bubble that was anticipating oil at $200 per barrel. And why was a market populated by the people who know most about oil supply expecting oil to stay dear? Because for the first time in history we are confonted with the immediate prospect of a decline in the supply of oil which is structural, not circumstantial. No one can say with any certainty when exactly oil production will peak and begin its inexhorable descent. But the earliest possible date is February 2008, when oil production hit its previous peak at just over 80 barrels per day. The current crisis may be be obscuring the fact that oil production is already in decline. This unfortunate conjunture of events will make the necessary adjustment even harder to achieve.

So in any case, we are in for the long haul, the tunnel that may one day see us emerge from our dependence on cheap energy. Or not. If decline is oil output is now structural, then it is already too late to begin the trainsition in any coherent manner. The process will be chaotic at best. At worst, the future does not even bear thinking about. Which should please a large number of people who are already adept at living this way.