1 Boring Old Man

Henry Ford introduced the Model-T in 1908, that’s 100 years ago. It required oil to run, so there’s been a century long run on oil. This Hubert Peak Graph shows that oil production in non-OPEC  non-Former Soviet Union countries peaked about the time George Bush got elected and are now in a steady decline. Apparently, accurate estimates of the oil reserves in the OPEC and FSU countries are less precise. Here’s one esitimate – very rough because of exploration gaps and corrupt reporting. Best I can tell they are probably too high:

Much of the known but untapped oil is in the extreme north, making harvest and transportation very difficult:

There are several points to make about these estimates. The high price of oil isn’t simply because of scarcity. There are a variety of other market forces driving the price up. The amount of available oil is finite, so the era of the Model-T is on the wane, independent of the morning rush hour traffic on your television set. Ironically, as global warming melts the frozen north, its oil becomes increasingly more accessible.

So the current equation is that we are on the waning edge of oil as an energy resource, though at current rates we’ve got another century. On the other hand, global warming [which is our doing] means that we really don’t have that kind of time. It’s calling the question earlier than we would like.  The usual answer is that we must become more energy efficient and find alternative energy sources. What’s becoming clear is that those alternative energy sources also, so far, increase global warming. So it’s insoluable!

Unless you look at the next graph, which is the real problem in the first place. This is the world’s problem, plain and simple. Fix this problem and the others solve themselves. Somehow we forgot about that along the way…