H G Wells on Peak Oil

"Coal and oil are our only capital. They are all we have for great important efforts. They are a gift to mankind to use to some supreme end or to waste in trivialities. Coal is the key to metallurgy and oil to transit. When they are done we shall either have built up such a fabric of apparatus, knowledge and social organization that we shall be able to manage without them—or we shall have traveled a long way down the slopes of waste toward extinction." 

– H.G. Wells, Secret Places of the Heart, 1921