Here, then is the overall picture: Demand for food is slowly outstripping supply. Food producers’ ability to meet growing needs is increasingly being strained by rising human populations, falling freshwater supplies, the rise of biofuels industries, expanding markets within industrializing nations for more resource-intensive meat and fish-based diets; dwindling wild fisheries; and climate instability. The result will almost inevitably be a worldwide food crisis sometime in the next two or three decades.

With instability in the Middle East driving oil prices higher, huge cracks are widening in the global economy. In an effort to broaden the conversation about Middle East unrest and its impacts on oil prices and economies, the Post Carbon Institute offers six informed perspectives on what to expect in the days, weeks and months ahead. Individuals, businesses and policy makers are made aware of the speed with which seemingly incremental price gains can topple global dominoes.

There are lots of things that we could be doing right now to reform our economy. To develop policies for conserving resources, for reducing carbon emissions, for making our economy fairer and more sustainable, for replacing our monetary system with one that’s not based on debt and less likely to collapse at a moment’s notice. Proposals for all of these things are out there. The problem is that for policy makers all of the incentives are to continue with business as usual. To pursue economic growth, for example, even if it’s no longer possible.

As oil prices reach $100 a barrel for the first time since 2008, many people are wondering whether 2011 will see a replay of crashing car sales, nose-diving airlines, and fuel-starved farmers. Food prices—which these days move almost in lockstep with oil prices—are already at frightening levels, leading Lester Brown of Earth Policy Institute to warn of “The Great Food Crisis of 2011.”

The world holds a huge amount of oil resources. Besides liquid oil, there is very heavy oil in various forms. There is also liquid oil trapped in oil shale, oil in very deep water, and oil that in not yet fully formed (still kerogen) in shale oil. Some would like us to believe that eventually, all of this can be extracted, so there is no issue with peak oil. How do we explain that this cannot really happen? The way I think of the situation is that our resources are of varying ”quality”, or ease of extraction. If we order them from highest quality to lowest quality, they would probably form something like a triangle (or perhaps the shape would be more like a rectangle, if the high quality resources are closer to equal in quantity to the low quality resources—it doesn’t matter too much for this discussion).

The missing link is oil, which hit a has new two-and-a-half year high and today topped $108 (£67) a barrel due to the instability in Libya – which has Africa’s biggest crude reserves. The price is moving closer to the record levels of more than $147 (£91), reached just before the financial crash in 2008.But in the longer term, the impact may also be evident on the dinner table because the zigs and zags of oil prices are increasingly being followed by grain.

I think we are discovering, as we attempt to enroll communities in the transition model, or the transition process, that the U.S. is different. Our culture is different. Our history is different, our mind-set is different. Some of the aspects of transition that were created in the UK need to be adapted for here. For instance, the transition works as if was defined by Rob Hopkins and The Transition Handbook – speaks really to Peak Oil and climate change as the primary drivers. It does not mention the economic situation that we are facing.

One of the pervasive mistakes made by people in the industrial world these days – oh, all right, made by most Americans and a much smaller number of people elsewhere – is the notion that the only thing that matters when you’re dealing with heat is having enough energy to produce it. Every autumn, accordingly, you can go to your local department store and find scores of portable heaters waiting for you in serried ranks, so that you can turn electricity or propane or what have you into plenty of heat wherever you want it. You can do that, but unless you do something to encourage the heat to stay around for a while, it’s not going to work very well, and it’s also going to cost you plenty, because producing heat is only the first part of what matters; the rest of the equation, which is in many ways the most important part, is keeping the heat from leaving the place you put it any sooner than it has to.

And if you believe there is space for peak oil and climate change in the account of events in Egypt, then that turmoil truly is emblematic of what to expect elsewhere. With the global population surging to seven billion, the UN warning of riots around the world if food prices don’t come down, oil prices rising again on the back of growing worldwide demand, and global warming making problems worse, the elements are in place for a humanitarian disaster. Despite the actions of all the deniers, I believe the next few years will see results of peak oil and climate change. The warnings are all in place.