Number of words: 235

Whatever product or service you look at, its pricing is based on fossil fuels. Infrastructure and construction are reliant on metals mined all over the world, from Canada to Australia, but those metals not only need to be mined, they need to be processed and transported by ships and trucks to sites. Food is harvested world- wide on an industrial scale by machinery that is run on oil and it is boosted by phosphates and fertilisers that, fuels for their manufacture. Even the wonder of the age, the inter- net, is dependent on the manufacture of ever more powerful chips and PCs that are built in factories fed with fossil-fuel-based energy while the electricity that drives worldwide communication is powered, for the most part, from the same source. Everything is built on the platform of oil, gas and coal. Nuclear power plants are constructed and maintained using oil-based energy; wind turbines are reliant on steel; solar panels need other metals and are manufactured in plants dependent on fossil-fuel electricity. 

The fact is that the modern world is constructed on a limited sea of oil, gas and coal from which it takes an irreversible and non-renewable drawdown every day. Oil is the base commodity and its price dictates to just about every other price- from metals to food, as energy determines the price of mining and agriculture.

Excerpted from  pages 45 of ‘Energise, by Eddie Hobbs