Has the world reached Peak Oil?

I have been following the issues surrounding energy ever since I can remember.  A friend of my father's told me when I was in fifth grade that there were only three subjects of importance--food, drinking water, and energy.  Get those right, he would say, and everything else is easy.

But the real eye opener on energy came when I took Dr. Dean Abrahamson's famous Energy and Public Policy class in the fall of 1974 while the first Arab oil embargo was still fresh in everyone's mind.  I wrote two papers for his class--one was on the problems of retrofitting existing structures for greater energy efficiency and the other was on the problems of large crude supertankers.

Did some work on retrofitting houses--enough in fact to come to the conclusion that actually increasing energy efficiency in old buildings was damn near impossible.  Never even got close to a supertanker.  In fact, most of my experience in energy matters is that of an extremely interested amateur.  And of course, the most interesting question for anyone who wishes to watch energy policy events is when Peak Oil will happen.

Not long ago, I got the cold creepy feeling that asking when peak oil would happen had been replaced with the uglier question, Has Peak Oil already happened?  I happen to think the answer is yes.  In the following three-part series of clips, we can see that no less an authority than James Howard Kustler thinks peak oil has already occurred too.  This is VERY. INTERESTING. STUFF.