The oil is going, the oil is going!

A posh conference room on the 33rd floor of a skyscraper in downtown San Francisco is an elegant if ironic perch from which to ponder the uncertain future of life as we know it. One entire wall of the room is made of glass, a giant window offering a sweeping nighttime view of the Bay Bridge all lit up, sparkling with the orderly lights of the post-rush hour cars and trucks streaming across the bay into San Francisco. Yet the 20 people assembled around the golden conference table for the February monthly meeting of the San Francisco Post Carbon group believe that sooner rather than later that stream of cars and trucks will falter, if not actually stop, altogether. And as the geopolitical and economic dominoes start to fall in the wake of climbing oil prices, some wonder with macabre humor how long it will be before they'll have to climb 33 flights of stairs if they want to make it to this room.

Meeting in plush digs donated by a foundation for the occasion, San Francisco Post Carbon is a kind of combination study group, support group and citizens' action committee. Among their accomplishments is having produced a slick poster that depicts the history -- and possible future -- of the oil age, which they've distributed to every member of Congress. At least the lawmakers won't be able to say that they weren't warned! This post-carbon group is one of six such groups that meet regularly in the Bay Area. But it's hardly just a California obsession. There are groups around the world affiliated with the Vancouver, B.C., Post Carbon Institute, most of them in North America.

Over red wine and a potluck dinner of hummus and salads, the peak oilers, who tonight include a computer programmer, a consultant, a teacher, a retired engineer and a recent college grad, listen intently to the first speaker: Alice Friedemann, a systems analyst for a large transportation company. She's been studying the history of agriculture in California and learning sustainable farming techniques.

"As energy gets more expensive, food will get more expensive," Friedemann says, citing a stat that's often mentioned in peak-oil circles: In our era of industrial agriculture, it takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel inputs for fertilizers, pesticides, farm equipment and transportation from natural gas, oil and coal to produce one calorie of food. The fear is that the rising price of oil will drive us to rely on other fossil fuels, draining those as well, and destroying the atmosphere in the process.

Friedemann remarks that there are home-court advantages to being so close to California's fertile Central Valley. "The good news is we're near the food," she says. "But the bad news is people are likely to come here not just because of the food but because it will be too hot or cold where they live." Grapes of wrath, anyone?

Still, the prospects for growing a lot of food locally, à la the victory gardens during World War II, in these parts don't look good to her, given the built environment and population density. Even assuming "bio-intensive" farming methods, where just 4,000 square feet of land can produce enough food to feed a vegetarian diet to one person, there's nowhere near enough land in Oakland, where she lives, that's not in the shade of homes or buildings, covered in concrete, or on steep parkland with poor topsoil.

How bad does Friedemann really believe things are going to get? "I believe that we're going back to the 13th century at some point," she tells me. Her grandfather was a geologist who knew the geophysicist M. King Hubbert, who first posited the theory of peak oil, predicting the peak of U.S. production in the '70s. Having studied alternative energy for years, Friedemann says she just doesn't believe that there is anything that's going to replace oil, or even come close. "We won't appreciate what oil really did for us until we have to go back to muscle power," she says. The question that clearly both appalls and fascinates her is what happens next?

"How do you reengineer society to go backward? How do you carve up container ships and turn them into sailboats? We can't go back to steam engines burning wood because we burned all that wood when we were clearing the fields for farms," she says. And even going back to beasts of burden, using the muscle power of horses for transportation, isn't straightforward, not when horses and people are competing for local, arable land.

"On average, a horse needs six acres of pasture," she says. "So you can't use that for food if you're growing the food to feed the horses." At an upcoming meeting of the East Bay peak oil group, she'll be teaching a class on milling your own grain and cooking it. "These are skills that would be useful to have. I suspect that there'll be oil shocks and food shortages but grain is something that keeps for years and years and years. It's something that you can have at home as the grocery store shelves empty. It's going to be more Third World-like and people are going to need to cope."

At the meeting, it's time for a report on efforts to lobby the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to consider what impact peak oil might have in the city. Last year, a formal request to hold a hearing on peak oil died in committee. In the past few weeks, some of the post-carbon members have met with staffers from several supes' offices, some of whom were more sympathetic to their issue than others. "They looked at us and smiled," says Dennis Brumm, 53, a former middle manager at a produce company, now retired on disability, who devotes himself to activism. "Most of them didn't smile," chimes in Allyse Heartwell, 24, a recent college grad, drawing knowing chuckles from the rest of the group. The post-carbon group realizes that theirs is a very tough problem to get politicians excited about, given they can't in good conscience suggest an obvious way to fix it. "It's very difficult to go and say, 'We have a problem that has no real solution, and we are trying to mitigate what will happen to culture,'" says Brumm.

The group wants San Francisco to undertake a study to gauge what peak oil will mean to the city's economy, food distribution, transportation and tourism. "I want to see Golden Gate Park planted with community gardens," Heartwell tells me later. Heartwell, who studied international environmental issues in college, says that she's never been an activist but she's recently become obsessed with peak oil and reads sites like Energy Bulletin and the Oil Drum religiously. "Honestly, I don't think that it's likely that we're going to make smart choices in the next 10 or 20 years. It's hard but I personally don't see anything to be done but keeping at it," she says of the lobbying efforts. "Five years down the road, 10 years down the road, I would be kicking myself if I didn't do something, unless I'm starving, in which case, I would probably be kicking myself even more."

Some members of the group are trying to lower their personal energy consumption -- in the peak-oil vernacular, "powering down." One man has cut his gas consumption in half on his daily commute by buying a hybrid car. Several don't own cars. Some have solar panels on their homes and sensors so that the lights turn off when they leave the room. One chose to travel by train rather than plane on a trip to visit family in Texas over the holidays. But while they support the idea of taking individual action, they're aware that their own efforts are drops in the global bucket, and while they believe in setting a good example about a lower-energy lifestyle, they know just how hard it is to get anyone to listen when you're sounding this kind of alarm.

"The public doesn't understand how integrated oil is into every aspect of our lives," says Richard Katz, 55, who is fond of bringing oil industry newspaper ads to group meetings and giving a gallows-humor take on them. "The American spin on the world is that there is always some new technology or new answer that's around the corner. Standard economics says that there is always something to replace whatever is rare. But what we're talking about here -- oil -- is the product of millions and millions of years of distilled sunlight. How do you get people excited about living with less?"

Fridley of the Lawrence Lab rises out of his seat to tell us about "the myth of biofuels." He argues that the likes of ethanol, fuel drawn from crops like corn or plants like switchgrass, are not going to save the day. "Once you get past the media hype about ethanol, the reality scares you," he says. Fridley fears that in the search for cheap liquid fuel to replace oil we'll end up overmining the soil. By his calculations, the long-term potential of biofuels is low, yet it's draining federal dollars from wind and solar, about which he's more optimistic.

Finally, a documentary filmmaker working on a project called "Everybody Loves Oil" shows a preview and makes a plea for funds, while everyone passes around a glass mason jar, decorated with an apple, grapes and a pear, and filled with oil that was pumped out of a well in Bakersfield. It's a reminder that the slimy gunk that brought us together tonight is about to tear our whole world apart.

Next page: Why energy guru Amory Lovins isn't worried about peak oil