The world now consumes 31.8 billion barrels of oil per year. 1978 was the last year that this volume of oil was discovered and more recently discovery has been running at less than 10 billion barrels per year. It is an utterly forlorn hope that exploration and new discoveries may alleviate the current supply crisis....
We are now in the early stages of a full blown energy crisis that was predictable if not wholly avoidable. Politicians are awaking to the crisis now that escalating energy costs make its existence plain to see. It is highly unlikely that politicians will now grasp the gravity of the situation that the OECD and rest of the world faces and the responses will likely be ineffectual and too little too late.
The principal reason for current high oil price is the proximity of a peak in global oil production. Politicians must understand this and then grasp that natural gas and coal supplies will follow oil down by mid century. Reducing taxes on energy consumption right now is the wrong thing to do. Taxation structure needs to be adjusted to oblige energy producing companies to re-invest wind fall profits in alternative energy sources on a truly massive scale.
Energy efficiency should be the guiding beacon of all policy decisions and this must apply equally to energy production and energy consumption.
The car is already half-way off the cliff and we're still sitting around debating not just how hard but whether to even hit the brakes. It's mind-boggling and more than a little scary, and the population density and lack of any decent mass transportation in the U.S. makes us one of the most vulnerable first-world countries when the shit starts to really hit the fan. We need an Apollo program aimed at fixing this mess, and we need it five years ago
