Gail is a professional actuary who applies classic risk assessment procedures to global resources: studying issues such as oil & natural gas depletion, water shortages, climate change, etc. These days, she writes at her website OurFiniteWorld.com.

While as an actuary, Gail is one to avoid hyperbole and the let the numbers speak, her analysis of the outlook for future oil production is nothing short of dire:

What we need is cheap energy. We need cheap, liquid oil. When it's high-priced it really messes up the economy. We need oil to run our cars and to operate our trucks and such things, but it needs to be cheap. And it suddenly is today.

But, you have to be able to keep pulling it out at that same price. And the critical thing is, we can't keep pulling it out at that price. What is going to happen, I'm afraid, is that once production goes down, we won't be able to get it back up again.

There's several reasons. One of them is that very low interest rates have been helping keep production up. Once you get your interest rates back up because there's been a lot of failures, particularly in the shale industry, the costs will be higher.