I'm scared shitless by peak oil

Is it just me?

Last year one of the academic tutors at college told me to get out and see the world 'before the oil runs out'. Now, she's a bit of a hippy, but a highly intelligent, well educated hippy. Still, I didn't quite know what she was talking about.

Recently, Mr. Salamone posted a link to one of the more prominent (yet thorough) peak oil sites, and I've been shitting bricks ever since. It's one big suburban, bourgeois nightmare. And I say that as someone who's proudly suburban and thoroughly bourgeois.

Ok, so a lot of people were badly burnt by Y2K hysteria, which had a lot more media coverage than peak oil, relative to their supposed time of impact. Still, everything I've read that has attempted to debunk peak oil has been crappy at best. Now, I'm all for hyping the market mechanism to the hilt when it comes to solving problems, particularly in regard to enviro-skepticism. However, the repeated use of 'the market will fix it' and 'alternative energy sources' as anti-doomsday mantras is only convincing when accompanied by at least a skeleton plan. I've yet to see a debunking essay that can respond with any conviction to specific peak oil claims.

This topic ties in nicely with the recent Integral Naked conversation between KW and Michael Chrichton, regarding the impossibility of predicting the future. Now, regardless of the merits of that conversation regarding global warming, surely the same principles can be applied to the coming peak oil crisis?

Furthermore, isn't this an area rife for some kind of Integral speculation? Given that future scenarios essentially revolve around the idea of suburban life being retooled along previous lines: the end of walmart style corporations and the rebirth of civic life and the importance of local, highly urbanized communities.

Can the holonic metaphor apply here? That being if any Holon lower in the chain is destroyed, it prevents higher holons from emerging. So does the informational, post-industrial society rely on the industrial society to exist, or is our current lifestyle a particular offshoot of a certain breed of capitalism (if you're familiar with it, Jameson's the cultural logic of late capitalism seems applicable) and as such we wont see a descent into a pre-industrial mindset, but rather the retooling of cultural life, that will essentially subdue capitalistic cultural values, which will in turn place the emphasis firmly on community, which can be both pre-formal or just emerging into formal, and post-formal (I'm trying really hard not to say Blue and Green here).

More blunty: If industrial society is gutted, then what bits of post-industrial society will remain (assuming the worst case scenario?). If we're going to have faith in some kind of evolutionary telos, then peak oil will be corrective (perhaps violently, agonizingly corrective, but corrective none the less). Or is a matter of cultural/societal entropy, in which case Nihilism is the go?

Ok, rant over. Just got a little bit freaked out reading all the peak oil literature. Everyone who's read it seems to have the same reaction: FUCK! followed by a mix of bewilderment and skepticism. So that's my 2 cents.