Convinced the planet’s oil supply is dwindling and the world’s economies are heading for a crash, some people around the country are moving onto homesteads, learning to live off their land, conserving fuel and, in some cases, stocking up on guns they expect to use to defend themselves and their supplies from desperate crowds of people who didn’t prepare.

We rely on it to power our everyday lives, and it drives the economy worldwide, but oil faces an uncertain future in the 21st century. Black gold is increasingly expensive, environmentally damaging and, in the view of some experts, increasingly scarce.

Also, see this Salon article, “The peak oil culture wars”

Rising oil prices, global food shortages and the economic crisis are proof for many survivalists that society is on the brink of meltdown. But are their predictions all gloom and doom - or a chance to create new communities?

Get ready for another economic shock of major proportions — a virtual doubling of prices at the gas pump to as much as $10 a gallon.

That’s the message from a couple of analytical energy industry trackers, both of whom, based on the surging oil prices, see considerably more pain at the pump than most drivers realize.

Gasoline nationally is in an accelerated upswing, having jumped to $3.58 a gallon from $3.50 in just the past week.

As the price of oil climbs to $117 a barrel and petrol at the pump reaches 110p a litre, motorists are wondering how long this latest spike is going to last. Is it just another of those temporary jumps in the cost of fuel that we saw in the 1970s and 1980s or is this a new reality which will last for good?

The answer is that it is likely to stay. While market prices may or may not continue shooting into the stratosphere over the next few months, they are certainly incapable of falling back down to the levels of $60-$70 a barrel seen even a year ago.

The reason is that oil supply is increasingly constrained by extraction costs while demand, fanned by the growth of huge emerging economies like China and India, is remorseless. The International Energy Agency forecasts that in 2008, the world will need an extra 1.3 million barrels a day (bpd), but only 800,000 extra bpd will be supplied.