Oil prices are spiraling upward with no end in sight. Consumers are pinching pennies to fill their cars with gasoline, and airlines are going bankrupt amid skyrocketing fuel costs. Clearly, OPEC and the ever-rapacious oil companies are to blame for high oil prices, right? Actually, no — you and I are the culprits.

Civilization's insatiable demand for oil is rapidly depleting the oil stores within the Earth. During the past 100 years we have blown through about half of the global oil resources and continue to use it at increasing rates. The world now uses about 1,000 barrels of oil per second. Americans use 25 percent of that, even though we represent only 5 percent of the world's population.

New global oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s, and we now consume about four times more oil each year than we discover. We produce more oil than ever before, but difficulties in finding new oil fields and the reduced output of aging oil wells indicate an imminent peak followed by a relentless decline — a situation known as "peak oil."

Many experts believe that peak oil already may have occurred or likely will occur within the next few years. The severity of the consequences of peak oil depends on how quickly the supply declines. Producing oil fields are being depleted at an average rate of from 4 percent to 8 percent per year, with the larger fields such as the huge Cantarell field off Mexico and the North Sea fields depleting at even higher rates.

Opening new large fields such as Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will have little effect on oil supplies, since even ANWR — our biggest domestic find in 40 years — will not supply more than about 5 percent of current U.S. demand. No matter how much we would like the price of oil to be low enough to support our addiction, prices almost certainly will rise until oil becomes entirely unaffordable.

The United States oil production peaked in the 1970s, forcing us to increasingly rely on cheap foreign oil. Today the high-quality, easy oil is nearly gone and companies are forced to look for oil in remote areas, and drill deeper into smaller reservoirs where oil is more difficult to find and produce. Oil companies skimmed the cream in the early days, and now must use costly equipment and methods to extract and process lower-quality oil into usable products. Oil in the future will be both poorer in quality and far more expensive. In less than a lifetime oil will likely be so depleted that it will no longer be a viable source of energy.

Oil products such as jet fuel, gasoline and diesel are still the most available, portable, storable, easily processed and cheapest energy source available. Natural gas and oil also provide so many of the chemicals necessary for production of plastics, fertilizers, pesticides and other products we depend on. No factor is more responsible for the growth and maintenance of industrial agriculture, the thriving global economy and expanding population than the availability of cheap energy.

Finding alternatives, particularly for liquid fuels, is critical. To be useful, new fuels must be able to deliver considerably more energy than is required to produce them. The energy return on energy investment, or ERoEI, for oil was about 60:1 in the mid-20th century but is now about 20:1 because of the growing difficulties with the natural supply. An ERoEI of less than 1:1, for example, means that the fuel requires more energy to produce than it will deliver. This is the case for the generation of hydrogen fuel from electricity — meaning that it actually costs us more energy to produce hydrogen fuel than we can get out of it.

It is possible to produce synthetic oil, or synfuel, from coal and tar sands, but the process is expensive, dirty, and requires large amounts of energy and water. Unlike conventional oil pumped out of the ground as an easily transported and processed liquid, coal and tar sands are mined, heated with added water, and heavily refined to obtain synfuel. This results in considerably lower energy return on energy investment than conventional oil.

Even so, synfuels will likely be the only practical replacement for transportation fuel, and the economic pressure to use them will be strong despite the environmental impact. But synfuels, like conventional oil, are fossil fuels and won't last forever. For civilization to survive the decline of fossil fuels relatively intact, at least one relatively cheap and available energy source with a large ERoEI to replace oil must be identified and put into use before it is too late. As the flow of oil slows, the infrastructure, industry and agriculture dependent upon it will deteriorate unless replacements are found.

While people in Hawai'i are now focused primarily on the price of gasoline, we depend on oil for virtually everything — including importing much of our food and manufactured goods, generating our electricity and flying tourists and ourselves to and from the islands. Oil supplies about 90 percent of Hawai'i's energy and nearly 100 percent of our transportation energy. Wind, solar, geothermal and similar ventures show promise but are expensive and fall far short of meeting our energy needs. With no viable alternatives to oil in sight, Hawai'i is more vulnerable to oil price fluctuations and shortages than almost any place in the world, and unlike the gas shortage in the 1970s, the coming crisis will not end.

Preparing for disruptions in the oil supply and retooling for life with far less oil is a sensible path for any state or country, but critical for Hawai'i. The cost of such preparation is far less than the cost of doing nothing and being left high and dry when supply disruption hits.

Energy experts point to several events that signal the onset of peak oil: rapid increases and fluctuations in energy costs, increases in costs of products and services that depend on oil (such as food and transportation), wars to protect and capture resources, and declining economies. Frighteningly, this seems to suggest that the end of the oil age has already begun.