Last Page - End Of The Oil Age

Thanks For The Good Times, Earth, It's Been A Gas

As the final smoky wisps of sweet, sweet hydrocarbons swirl lazily up into the air, take a long whiff while you can. One day, you'll want to tell your grandchildren what it was like. Way back when there was so much oil around, so cheap, we used it to power everything from whimsical two-stroke margarita blenders to GSXR-powered minibikes-just for grins. An age when internal combustion ruled, and oil would never run out.

Oil is one of the great freebies of planet Earth. Vast reserves of easily portable energy tucked away underfoot, waiting to be exploited, like some kind of boundless go-juice trust fund left to us by incomprehensibly generous dead relatives. With interest compounded for the last 60 million years.

Only took a couple of centuries to burn through most of it, and now the Oil Age is winding down. The once-brimming underground nectar caverns that power our thirsty Ford F250 pickups are getting sapped of their creamy black goodness. No doubt, the keg is running dry at our steamy global orgy of petro-combustion.

So as we ride blindly into the future, our beloved gas-sucking engines are one day sure to fall silent. In time, they'll become so expensive to run and generally anti-social that they'll be little more than quaint relics, reserved for the amusement of craggy old men in faded Incubus T-shirts.

Maybe one day we'll find a power source more exciting than oil, but don't count on it. Flailing pistons and 400 fiery explosions every second are going to be hard to top, at least to us born of the Oil Age. So twist the throttle, pop the clutch and burn it while you got it!