ABSTRACT
The events of the last months in the Persian Gulf put me again in the same frame of mind as that of eleven years ago when, interviewed together with some twenty other economists for The New York Times Magazine of 30 December 1979, my answer was a truly singular declaration. I said that the most perilous issue for our economy—nay, for our species—was not the economic tribulations caused by inflation or by unemployment which then just as today monopolized the attention of standard economists, but the accelerated depletion of fossil fuels, especially that of oil, the most effective source of energy of modern times. I concluded by saying that “if serious concerted action [to rationalize the production and the distribution of fossil fuels] is not forthcoming soon, warheads are likely to fly over the possession of the last drop of oil” (here italicized).
