carlislematthew, I also hope that eventually we’ll get over our nuclear phobia and start building oodles of nuclear plants. This is one of many actions we need to assist the transition in the coming years.
Beyond that, of course we’ll never run out of oil, but the rate of production could be insufficient before we are ready to transition to something else. There are no alternative technologies today that are inexpensive and scalable, and this problem transcends economics 101. I think many people confuse “technology” of the electronics and semiconductor industries with oil-field technology. We have made amazing strides in electronics and computers in the last 20-30 years, but there is a reason all of these alternative energies are still undeveloped, despite several oil shocks and assurance that once oil hits $30, $40, $50, $60, $70/barrel they will ‘finally’ come online. Or to put it another way, there is a reason we don’t have colonies on the moon yet; some physical realities trump economics
I read the Economist article you spoke of and frankly, it was rather shoddy and biased journalism. There were several factual inacurracies. To cite one example: the author claimed the North Sea production basin was only now peaking when it has actually been in a precipitous decline for years. The British side of the basin has fallen from 6.1 million barrels per day in 1999 to only 3.6 million barrels per day now. Adittionally, no one really knows how much oil in left in the middle east. We take their stated reserve numbers as fact, when we really have no way of auditing them. Matt Simmons makes a disturbingly convincing case in his book Twilight in the Desert that Saudi Arabia’s fields could be ripe for severe declines and that ‘abundant middle-eastern oil’ may be one of the greatest myths of the last 70 years.
The title of this thread is $100 oil. I don’t know where the price is headed over the next few years, but if it goes back to $20, that implies a severe economic or geopolitical malfunction.
