A German energy group predicts that 2006 will have been the peak of oil production, and states that output will slide rapidly from here on in. This is a very downside prediction, far worse than most. However, it is only worse than most. It also underscores that we have seen the peak of conventional light oil, and are going to see our next swing upwards in production only when unconventional sources fill the gap. It is still technically possible for them to do so, but only at increasingly poor return rates. Even if this report turns out to be very pessimistic, it is right in its outlines: the oil that we have fought over is a dying commodity.

It points to the coming mega-conflict, and why the transfigured world that comes after it is of intense interest to us.

There have been successive mega conflicts in European history, these conflicts are vast arcs which center around the struggle for the control of crucial resources. We are, now, most interested in mega conflicts associated with energy culture, because we are about to face one. There have been other cycles of mega-conflict of course. No energy culture issue was at stake in the Hundred Years War, but instead an issue of utilization of production.

The mega-conflicts we are most interested in then are the transitions from muscle to wind/water, wind/water to coal/steam/digital electrical to petroleum/analog electrical. Or, the mega conflict culminating with the 30 years war, the mega conflict culminating with the American Civil War and The wars of German Unification, the mega conflict culminating with World War II. Unlike mega conflicts over space, such as the land wars of Louis XIV, the Cold War or Nordic attacks on the Germanic world circa 800-1100, energy culture wars are more compressed, more intensive and have a natural division. Land wars can go on dismally for ages, precisely because there is no technological pressure that creates a beginning, middle and an end. On the other hand, energy culture conflicts, because they are associated with the rise of not only technology, but social organization and ideas, often set records for destructiveness and barbarity. Land wars limit their barbarity precisely because they are fighting over people and territory in tact. Energy wars can almost dispense with people, so valuable is the resource in question.

The cycle of an energy conflict is first a conflict over the last of the old resource: the Napoleonic Wars were a fight over the control of internal water power, which reached full utilization only two decades after Waterloo. The second half of the conflict is a conflict over the new resource. The Wars of German Unification culminated with a conflict between France and Germany over the coal rich lands of the Rhine.

The second part of the mega-conflict is a conflict over the new resource: water/wind, coal, or petroleum. The Second World War was the first war specifically over petroleum globally. The countries that had it survived, the ones that reached out to grab it did not.

In our case the petroleum era is going to, and must, see an increasingly violent series of conflicts over the control of remaining oil, each one driven by the fear that oil will limit development, or allow the procurement of weapons of mass destruction. These fears are absurd, but very real. It is Pakistan and North Korea, not Iraq or Iran, that have atomic weapons and the means to deliver them. Israel, not Saudi Arabia, South Africa, not Nigeria. Oil rich states might play at atomic weapons, but in the end they rely on their control of oil. Oil poor nations seek out atomic weapons as the means to blunt the ability of oil rich nations to engage in mechanized warfare.

The second half of the conflict will see a conflict over the rise of the electrical economy. Electricity is the energy delivery vehicle of the future, and basis of the future economy. It is electricity which can be produced in both energy dense and energy sparse ways, it is electricity that can drive a non-carbon economy, it is electricity that can run a knowledge economy, it is electricity that can create new forms of value. Electricity is the energy delivery system, and the emergence of the electrical economy is proceeding even as the petroleum economy's simple to implement system makes it the path of least resistance. However, in the present electricity is tied to coal.

This reality, that the electrical economy is blocked until new capital comes on line, where as the petroleum economy can simply charge more for old technology, shapes the coming mega-conflict. Until there is a massive build out of non-carbon sources of electricity, the electrical economy will seem remote. As long as the sprawl suburban economy is the default way to make money - it will seem the only thing worth killing to protect. The right that people will kill for is the right to over-consume what is under-priced. Carbon is this entity in our present.

Thus the increasing turbulence in the Middle East is inevitable, though, of course, it could be manged better than the present crop of moral cripples in office can manage. However, if not them, then some other group would be in place. Bobby Jindahl is head for the 2012 Republican ticket, because he is going to be all about how to make the current petroconomy and sprawlconomy last longer, and be more profitable for the people with oil. Blanco's monstrously incompetent reign in Louisiana points out the future of "That Other Republican Party" in the national scale: the Democratic leadership that thinks that the only problem with Bush is that he isn't very smart, is going to find out, as the string of muddle moderate Democrats from Granholm to Blagojevich, have found out, that the matter is not that the Republicans are merely more corrupt than they should be, but that the entire neo-classical economy is about to have its legs cut out from under it.

You see the neo-classical thesis is that supply and technology will make things better, and the essential thing is to prevent poor people from overspending. The elites are not really responsible, but like Trent Dilfer, they are game managers. Keep the oil coming, don't let wages rise too fast. As long as technology and oil supplies increased, the question was how to distribute whatever productivity wins were to be had as profits or wages, how to make sure that enough money poured into the developed world's rich so as to keep pace with the oil rich, and how to bash over the head real wage rises. In essence, if there was a problem, then the root cause was that poor people, defined as the bottom 90% of the economy, were spending too much, and the most likely cause was that government was protecting them from the results of their actions. Privatize, make the poor pay, and the price signal would cause them to stop doing whatever was causing a problem. Beef to expensive? Let them eat chicken. No, no inflation going on here.

The problem is that technology is stalled, in no small part because we are sinking much of our technical expertise into spying and warfare, and oil supplies are growing more slowly, while those who want entry into the automobile sprawlconomy grow rapidly. Offshoring has made all of these problems more acute.

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Now one way to have dealt with this would have been progressivism. Progressivism, not yet liberalism, which we will get to in a moment simply places an emphasis on creating progress, technological and social. The right can be progressive, and often is. Liberal progressivism states that universality of access to progress is better than denying entrance to progress. Conservative progressives want to make progress a thing that is dangled in front of poeple as an incentive to work hard. Liberals believe that people who have access to progress make better use of it.

However,that isn't what America has voted for in successive elections. America thought it was voting for it in this last election, and for a little while even DC thought so. But Bush realized that buying out a few Bush Dogs was only about 50 billion of military pork, and that old alliance of reactionary Republicans and conservative Democrats closed ranks. The result was all downhill. In no small part because the Democrats who ought to have been progressives shot themselves in the foot repeatedly. Joe Lieberman being the shell they loaded into the gun.

But these details are details. The mega-conflict would be coming regardless of who is elected because the no-brainer economy is the petroleum economy, and while the bits and pieces of the new However this conflict is, grand exciting world are coming, as steam engines and flying machines came before the beginning of their eras as a harbinger, so too do we see technology that is not yet used to its full potential.

However, regardless of the cut and thrust of current politics the pressure of an economy that everyone knows how to work, and everyone knows is going to blow up -- even optimistic estimates put the time limit on petroleum at 40 years, that is within the lifetime of the Agonist's staff, and even some members of Congress. This means that a conflict over the dwindling supplies is inevitable, because there is not enough to fulfill all the promises for future prosperity made.

By the same token, this conflict is going to be short on its intense conflict, and long, as Iraq, the occupation of Palestine by Israel, and the conflicts in Nigeria and other oil rich countries, in its dragging out. This is because it is enough for the loser of the invasion to simply deny peace to the other side, the "juice precious juice" lying beneath the ground.

This very nature of oil conflicts tells us what we need to know about the first half of the mega-conflict, that is that it is going to rapidly require sacrifice to fight it. Oil, the resource that is now endemic in the economy, is also the resource to fight the war. This was not so in World War II, where much of the developed economy was still on steam or even muscle power - hence sacrifice was not so bad, because the coal and muscle economies had long since peaked. People did not even really understand how transformative the petroleum economy would be until it arrived in force. Now such sacrifice is unthinkable, which has lead to the peculiar situation of tax cuts in war time.

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Thus long before the mega conflict even reaches its half way point, the new economy will exist, as it often has, at the most advanced and most dislocated parts of the economy. High electrical economy in the form of the netropolis, low electrical economy in the form of wind build out, bio-fuels and move to far exurban areas.

This means that the second part of the mega-conflict is very likely to feature a reach for asymmetrical warfare and destruction that is beyond even mass destruction. As petroleum vanishes and must be replaced by spiralingly more expensive forms of energy, the desire to reach out and shatter the enemy with biological, nuclear or space based weapons becomes more and more tempting. To end it once and for all.

Of course it only ends once and for all, when petroleum no longer dominates our economic thinking and capital base. Wars are very good at editing down the capital base. Along with the population base that has claims on future resources. Sadly the way new economies are often born is to pay off the debt created by a war that destroyed the old capital.