After almost 20 years as chief economist, Jeff Rubin left CIBC World Markets in 2009 to launch his book, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization, which became last year’s No. 1 hardcover nonfiction title in Canada. He’s outspoken (Rubin says $145-a-barrel oil, not subprime lending, caused the recession) but he’s earned it. Over the years, his contrarian positions on real estate, the Canadian dollar, and especially oil prices have been uncannily accurate.

Your book is about the end of cheap oil and its consequences. What’s the main message?
Our rendezvous with triple-digit oil prices is probably within the next three to four months. We have to reorient our economy so we burn less fuel. And the way to do that is to go from a global economy to a regional, local economy because a global economy is very energy-intensive. No matter how you move stuff around—by air, by ship, by truck, by rail—you’re burning oil.

Does that mean life is about to get a whole lot harder?
We won’t be eating fresh blueberries in February, we won’t be importing our steel from China and we probably won’t be going on a holiday to Machu Picchu. But we’ll get more jobs in Hamilton, the revitalization of our agricultural sector, and two-week canoe trips to Algonquin Park. There are more than a few silver linings in that world.

How can we prepare?
It’s important that we make the right choices. Bailing out investment banks and auto companies that face obsolescence is not what we want to do.
Spending billions of dollars on public transit is.

We should have let the automakers collapse?
They’re going to collapse anyway, at least here. Last year for the first time in the post-war period there were 4 million fewer drivers in America. And I’m predicting in the next ten years there’s going to be 40 to 50 million American drivers taking the exit lane. Canada and the U.S. probably have double the number of car plants the market can sustain. Is that the kind of outlook the taxpayer should be investing in?

As those cars disappear, won’t reduced demand for gasoline keep oil prices in check?
Unfortunately, for every one driver coming off the road in North America, there are ten people waiting to get on the road in Brazil, India, China, and Russia.

Are Alberta’s tar sands part of the solution or part of the problem?
I don’t have a problem with the tar sands. I’ve got a problem with one barrel of synthetic oil polluting 250 gallons of fresh water and burning 1,100 cubic feet of natural gas, and I’ve got a real simple solution to that problem: put a price on water, put a price on carbon emissions. I believe in the price mechanism. Suncor and Syncrude won’t care how much carbon they emit or how much water they pollute until they have to start paying.

Will green power initiatives help?
Find a strong enough wind and even pigs can fly. Pay 19 cents per kilowatt hour and wind can turn on the lights. Pay 40 cents a kilowatt hour and the sun can turn on the lights. But at those prices, how long can you afford to keep the lights on? It’s not the new energy supply that green power will bring to the grid, it’s the power demand they’ll kill that’s important.

After oil peaked at $145 pre-recession, are there still people who doubt your message?
Many people. But there won’t be in the next three months—just in time for my paperback edition.