Remember peak oil? Oh, I freaked out about that bigtime back in the day. It just kind of went away, didn’t it? Ah, fracking, you ruined James Howard Kunstler’s long emergency.

Or did you? Writing in the National Interest, Daniel L. Davis and Jeremy Leggett says that the data show shale oil gettable through fracking is not enough to offset increased demand from China and India on the world market. Excerpt:

The trend is clear for anybody willing to look at the data: if all the above developments continue between now and 2020, there will be insufficient supply at affordable prices to meet the global demand. If consumption in the developing world continues to increase, consumption of oil producing nations continues to rise, and American tight-oil production peaks in the 2017 timeframe (and then begins even a modest decline), the cumulative impact on global supplies could be significant. The economic and security consequences of such a series of events would be considerable.

Based on available evidence and reasonable projections, we believe the chances of a near-term oil-supply crisis to be sufficiently high to warrant the development of contingency planning by Western governments. The global economic implications of the onset of a crisis in which no plan for mitigating actions have been contemplated could be severe. The problems that would confront the world will require multilateral solutions; no one nation can independently thrive under such conditions. Though the hour is late, prudent analysis and planning now could stave off some of the worst possibilities later. We must not fail now to make contingency plans for an increasingly uncertain future.