The single global marketplace we all inhabit is built on the notion of a solid, growing supply of cheap oil and gas for decades to come. But that bedrock is about to crack and crumble. And the oil companies know it. As geologists, civil servants and industry insiders in this hard-hitting book tell us, the day the oil wells start to run dry is a lot closer than we think. Jeremy Leggett, a geologist who spent the 1980s in the service of Big Oil before jumping ship in the 1990s to become Chief Scientist at Greenpeace UK and then launching his own renewable energy initiatives, understands the scale of the impending crisis and the need for us to act now. With watertight knowledge and sobering clarity, Leggett explains how we became addicted to oil and how this habit is dragging us into an increasingly dangerous dependence upon the Middle East and towards economic and environmental catastrophe. And yet, his outlook is paradoxically positive, for all the technology we need to get off this road to disaster is already at hand.