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The United States isn’t the only nation with oil issues. Europe has long been import dependent, as has Japan. China has begun courting the same foreign producers Uncle Sam now spends so much political capital trying to control. So is the glorious golden age of oil over? We live today in a world completely dominated by energy. It is the bedrock of our wealth, comfort and our largely unquestioned faith in the inexorability of progress, implicit in every act and artefact of modern existence. We produce and consume energy not simply to heat and feed ourselves, to move ourselves or defend ourselves, but also to educate and entertain ourselves, to expand our knowledge, change our destiny, construct and reconstruct our world and fill it with stuff.

Everything we buy, from a hamburger at McDonald’s to a duck at a Beijing market, from plastic lawn chairs and opera tickets to computers and garbage service, from medical services and cancer drugs to farm fertilisers and Humvees, represents a measure of energy produced and then consumed.

For all its great successes, our energy economy is fatally flawed in nearly every respect. The oil industry is among the least stable of all business sectors, tremendously vulnerable to destructive price swings and utterly dependent on corrupt, despotic “petrostates” with uncertain futures.

Even optimistic energy experts go grey in the face when you ask them what we will use to fill up our fuel tanks 30 years from now.

It is not that the modern energy economy should be changed but that we no longer have a choice in the matter: the system is already changing, and not always for the better. Yet if it is obvious that the current energy economy is on its way out, no clear consensus has taken shape on what happens next, what the “next” energy economy will look like.

Even if some miracle technology is developed, this in itself is no assurance of an orderly or peaceful transition. Historically, shifts from one energy technology to another have proved wrenching. The leaps from wood to coal and coal to oil caused economic disruption and political uncertainty (16th-century Englishmen nearly revolted at having to burn coal instead of wood).

And these were fairly slow- motion transitions, occurring over several decades. Given that today’s energy infrastructure is even more intertwined with global economies, politics and culture, would a fundamental change in our energy technology be even more disruptive? How long would a transition take — a decade, 50 years? And what would a new energy order look like? Will it be better than the one we have or a hastily arranged, stopgap arrangement? Will we be richer or poorer, more powerful or more hampered, happier with our advanced energy technologies or bitter over our memories of a bygone golden age? And who will be in control? Are the current world powers — most of whom are the biggest consumers of oil — still likely to be the leaders in this brave new world? The path towards a new energy economy is fraught with political and economic risk.

Around the world the economic and military strategies of nearly every nation continue to be shaped by one overriding objective — to maintain uninterrupted access to energy. The goal is sacrosanct, to be pursued at all costs, regardless of the way it perverts the culture and politics of entire regions, props up corrupt governments and dictators or, ultimately, fosters the resentments that have already spawned such malignant figures as Muammar Gadaffi, Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.

Yet despite the staying power of the status quo, each year energy consumption continues unabated and the end of the current energy system not only becomes more inevitable but also appears more likely to occur as a traumatic event. In the end this question of disruption may be the most critical of all — not simply for policy makers and oil sheikhs but also for anyone accustomed to filling up at the petrol station or switching on an air conditioner.

Extracted from The End of Oil by Paul Roberts, to be published by Bloomsbury tomorrow at £17.99. Copies can be ordered for £14.39 plus £2.25 p&p from The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585 or at www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy