If this change has a Rosetta stone, it is an article in the March 1998 issue of Scientific American. Written by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrere, the article challenged the conventional wisdom of rising oil reserves.

"The End of Cheap Oil" asserted that global oil production would start to decline around the year 2010. Based on a global extension of techniques developed by geophysicist M. King Hubbert, the article showed that we were rapidly approaching the point where half of all oil reserves had been pumped out of the ground. The article also showed that most of the recent increases in oil reserves were political fictions, that new finds were smaller fields, and that global oil production would turn down as certainly as U.S. oil production had peaked in the late '60s.

Still worse, the authors predicted production would increasingly depend on the Middle East. "By 2002 or so the world will rely on Middle East nations, particularly the five near the Persian Gulf (Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates), to fill in the gap between dwindling supply and growing demand."

Campbell and Laherrere expected that the Middle East share of production would pass 30 percent by 2000 and "will quite probably hit 50 percent" by 2010. Thirty percent was the level that set the stage for the price shocks of the '70s.

It should be noted that the authors are not members of the gloom-and-doom school. They were careful to acknowledge alternative sources of oil that are, as yet, undeveloped. "The world is not running out of oil -- at least not yet," they declared. "What our society does face, and soon, is the end of the abundant and cheap oil on which all industrial nations depend."

One implication: The energy jolts of the last year could signal that we are about to experience the economic boom of the '80s and '90s in reverse.

Whether we focus on rising energy prices or their side effects, however, the important question is how we respond to the challenge.