ALBANY — The last time Richard Heinberg visited the Capital Region in the summer of 2006, oil cost about $70 a barrel and gasoline was $3 a gallon.

When he returned Tuesday to again talk about the gradual end of the golden age of cheap fossil fuel on which modern society floats, that barrel cost $105 and gas was tickling $4. Some experts are predicting prices could hit $5 by the summer.

Heinberg's message to a packed lecture hall at the downtown campus of the University at Albany: High oil prices are here to stay, global supply will continue its decades-long decline and a growing, energy-hungry global population led by China and India will bid up prices to compete for what is left.

A resident of northern California, Heinberg has been writing about the inevitable decline of fossil fuels, a situation also called Peak Oil, since his first book came out in 2003. His tenth book, "The End of Growth," was just released.

"We are going to have to get used to being more local," Heinberg said. "We will have to live in ways that some of our grandparents may have appreciated, and that we may have forgotten about."

Several hundred people at the University at Albany's Page Hall heard Heinberg talk about what might happen in the U.S. as a society built on a historically unique era of cheap fuel comes to grips with its gradual end.

He has set a specific day for what he calls "Peak Oil Day." On July 11, 2008, the price of a barrel of oil hit a record $147.27 in daily trading. That same month, world crude oil production achieved its all-time record of 74.8 million barrels per day.

Heinberg's visit was sponsored by the Capital Region Energy Forum, a seven-year-old, not-for-profit group that meets monthly at The College of Saint Rose.

Despite increasing efforts to drill oil in difficult to reach places, like the deep ocean, in underground shale formations and in remote tar sands, oil production has been essentially flat since 2005.

Drilling in such places, he said, is expensive and will continue to drive prices up. "The industry needs a price of $85 a barrel to justify the expenses, but anything over $100 risks triggering economic recessions, as we have seen," said Heinberg. In 2008, as the U.S. recession began, oil prices climbed to nearly $150 a barrel.

And with the planetary population at 7 billion people and climbing, demand for energy will continue to rise, also forcing up the price. In China, for example, the demand for energy is rising 8 percent a year.

He said that continuing unfettered use of fossil fuels also will drive man-made climate change. "We are negotiating with nature now, and nature can be a very tough negotiator," he said.

Heinberg's vision imagines a future in which people are less mobile (given that oil fuels 95 percent of global transportation), more self-sufficient and more plugged into local communities for food, services and manufactured goods. He said renewable fuels like wind and solar can make up for some of the absent fossil fuels, but those technologies are not currently able to replace a meaningful portion of that.

"This transition will be slow and costly ... Our lifestyle will be negotiated downward, and a lot of it will be kicking and screaming," he said.

In the short term, as fuel prices rise, people could adapt by using technology to make more efficient use of fuel.

For example, he said, smart phones and GPS systems could be used to coordinate shared use of motor vehicles in a kind of computer-assisted hitchhiking.

Areas could invest in small-scale industrial kitchens, so small producers of food could prepare and package their goods for the local markets. As a current example, he pointed to the Mission County Food Center in Montana, which prepares and packages speciality foods for a number of small suppliers.

But some discomfort will be inevitable, he said, pointing to what is happening in Japan, where the government has decided to ramp down nuclear energy production in the wake of last year's tsunami disaster that nearly caused a nuclear melt-down.

"They have decided that they are going to use less energy. You go into buildings in Japan, and the lights are on only in the room where people are working," said Heinberg. "And the buildings can be a little cold."

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