The metaphorical answer to this question is more important than the literal, but the literal is irresistibly short: No, unfortunately not. Humans will have at our disposal as much gasoline as we can burn in the 21st century. Nor are we likely to run out of heating oil, coal or natural gas, the other carbon-based fuels that have powered industrial civilization for 200 years.

Why won't we run out? And why is that unfortunate? After all, these fuels provide nearly 80% of the energy humans use to keep warm, to light buildings and run computers, to power the cars that get us around, the tractors that plant food, the hospitals that serve our sick. If these fuels were to vanish tomorrow, worldwide chaos would follow and humans would die in the hundreds of millions.

So why not rejoice at having lots of fuel to burn? Let me try to answer that by telling you about my friend Zhenbing.

I met Zhenbing in China in 1996, near the end of a six-year journey around the world to write a book about humanity's environmental future. A 30-year-old economics professor who was liked on sight by virtually everyone he met, Zhenbing was my interpreter during five weeks of travel throughout China. A born storyteller, he often recalled his childhood in a tiny village northwest of Beijing. Like most Chinese peasants of that era, Zhenbing's parents were too poor to buy coal. Instead, in a climate like Boston's, where winter temperatures often plunged below zero, they burned dried leaves to heat their mud hut. Their home's inside walls were often white with frost from November to April. MORE>>

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