Peak oil is starting to rear its ugly head

[Final-Fan]

NJ5 said:
The IEA has predicted for several years that crude-oil supplies will arc gently upward to keep pace with rising demand, topping 116 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 87 million barrels a day now. But the agency is now worried that aging oil fields and diminished investment mean that companies could struggle to break beyond 100 million barrels a day over the next two decades.

Now in this case I'll agree with Kyros that the market will adjust fast enough to counteract the problem. If the problem is merely that people aren't trying hard enough to get the oil out, then the market will certainly have more than enough companies/governments scrambling for the privilege of picking up the slack well before the global economy self-destructs.

Creating entirely new energy resource pools, on the other hand, is another matter. The natural instinct of capitalism is to keep taking from the well until it runs dry and by then it's FAR too late to avoid consequences on a scale yet unseen by man. Oh, I'll bet that by the time that oil was just getting to the really bad downslope on the bell curve there'd be a few great new energy sources, but they'd take many years if not decades to scale up to anywhere NEAR the levels that the world is used to getting -- no, anywhere near the levels the world NEEDS with its current setup. (Well, unless we get fusion, but we've been "10 years away" from that since the 1960s if I recall correctly, so don't bet on it.)

The market REACTS, and this time reacting just fucking isn't good enough. What is needed is to ACT.

(Reposted for visibility. Also, to clarify, nobody does anything in capitalism unless it turns a profit. By the time there's enough pressure to get people really going on non-oil (i.e. until enough people see enough profit for them in it), it'll be too late. That's why the government, hamhandedly and (in the case of ethanol) even misguidedly, is pulling all sorts of strings to create artificial market pressure.)