The question is worldwide, but it's also intimately local: how close are we to the big crimp in all our driving and flying and inefficient, electronic gizmo-infested houses?

How close to having to pay sharply more for everything, including food? How close to having to traumatically change the wastrel ways and infrastructures (notably urban sprawl) we've built up over the past 50 years of cheap oil? When are we going to get serious about preparing for the inevitable?

The question is raised by the upset in Libya, which provides two per cent of the world's oil. How can two per cent drive oil prices up so sharply? Yes there's speculation, hoarding and panic, but oil supply is that tight. It's coming anyway, and these hiccups are just reminders.

We should ban these outside energy experts. Every time one shows up at a Utility and Review Board hearing to remind us how muddled our energy practices are, it makes us look bad. This time it's about the planned $200-million-plus wood-burning power plant at Port Hawkesbury.

As if it wasn't enough that the project will devastate the forest even more than it already is, that burning wood is apparently as bad as burning coal and won't reduce greenhouse gas, and that a similar plant in New England was apparently built for half the projected cost, along comes U.S. renewable energy consultant Barry Sheingold to tell us that Nova Scotia Power Inc. hasn't done its homework on the project.