ABSTRACT
Energy security is a concept that resists concise definition. At its center lies a basic concern about access to energy resources, which first emerged as a distinctive problem of international politics in the 1970s, although harbingers of its significance had been apparent for decades before that. The seed from which the peak oil problem sprang is an article written by M. King Hubbert in 1949. Hubbert, a geologist, compared then known estimates of fossil fuel reserves to then-anticipated rates of consumption, and concluded that, when an expanding human population sets about consuming a finite resource, there must be a point at which the supply of that resource begins to dwindle toward zero. Egypt, having recruited Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPECs) Arab members to unsheathe the oil weapon on its behalf, eventually made peace with Israel on terms judged so treacherous that Egypt was expelled from the Arab League.
