The earth is running out of oil. Why is this not the top story every day, all the time?

[Rustynaerduwell]

The US has about five years worth of available oil reserves. The earth has about fifty years. Shell is at peak oil. My grandchildren will have no oil by the time they are my age. What am I missing here? Forget fossil fuels effects on the environment. Forget arbitrary target dates for getting off fossil fuels. That date is coming regardless of our goals. Isn't this a catastrophe all ready in the works? I don't get it. Am I not understanding what "peak oil" or "proven oil reserves means? Someone please explain to me why this is not the most important story of our times, regardless of political party.

[Kaleva]

1. Surviving climate change will be the big story in 50 years.

[Dustlawyer]

15. And one of the other stories will be why we allowed the big oil companies, other corporations,

And the media they hold hostage with their ad dollars, to control the narrative and our politicians with campaign donations.

We will not get meaningful climate change legislation, or any other beneficial legislation unless and until we get rid of campaign donations, dark money, Super PACs, and the revolving door.

This is the real reason we cannot pass anything! If we want change we all have to start here with singular focus. Funny how you never hear this talked about in the media. Oh yea, they receive all of the campaign money.

[Kaleva]

18. Some scientists believe we are already past the point of no return

The effort should be on preparing to adapt to what's predicted to come.

[John Ludi]

2. I was a small but loud

voice in the Peak Oil community when it was in a much higher profile place than it is now. It falls in line with climate change, psychologically speaking; not immediate enough for most people. Fracking also took the wind out of our sails in that it gave people a sense of hope and relief (whether or not that hope and relief was valid is another discussion entirely).

I remember a few weeks before Matt Simmons died he thought the gas pumps would run dry in the relatively near future, and he left us in 2010...so it's been 12 years. I DO think that it'll sneak up on us and hit us HARD one of these days/weeks/months/years, but we could all be radioactive by that point...or dying of hunger because the climate shifts too quickly to allow for predictable harvests in critical food supply areas...or any of a number of things.

Not to minimize it; it's pretty high on my list of concerns.

[Another Jackalope]

9. Ditto

I contributed a couple of articles to The Oil Drum back in the day under my old handle GliderGuider. My Peak Oil involvement cemented my absolute doomer POV, even when the concept lost steam. I realized that it didn't really matter when the wells ran dry, Climate Change had beaten them to the finish line. It turns out that even without Peak Oil there's plenty to despair about...

[John Ludi]

17. Yes...I was on there

in the "good old days".

And yes...that was one of the things that told me that I probably wouldn't make it to a ripe old age...and if I somehow did, I probably wouldn't be too happy about it.

[Duppers]

19. Hello, old friend.

[Another Jackalope]

21. Hey there yourself!

[Doc Sportello]

3. Denial ain't just a river in Egypt

Why doesn't an alcoholic stop drinking? Perhaps not a fair analogy, but humankind is infected with several diseases and the cures are known. They won't be acted upon until it's too late.

[Omen78]

4. Over simplifying, but..

I view "proven oil reserves" as low hanging fruit. It is what's **currently** the easiest/cost effective means of getting to the oil and refining. That date isn't a hard date as you may think. As technology progresses so does what is considered to be recoverable oil. Reserves change year to year if not quarterly. The US is sitting on something like a trillion barrels of shale that hasn't really been tapped into. The problem is with the current technology it cost too much to extract/refine. Hopefully as we become less oil dependent we will never tap into it.

[Rustynaerduwell]

7. As I understand it, it's not the cost in money that prevents further extraction,

it's that fact that it would take more oil to extract than it the oil we get out of it.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

5. We've been running out of oil for decades.

I haven't a clue, and neither does anyone else, exactly how much oil is really out there to be used.

[lagomorph777]

6. The end of oil is a good thing, not a bad thing.

But indeed, we should be treating this with much greater urgency. One more reason to go green.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

29. The end of oil is good if we live through the wars it's likely to cause on the way there.

[doc03]

8. The subject of "Peak Oil" was a big thing here at least 10 years ago.

According to posts back then we should have run out a long time ago. Seems like there is plenty
as long as there are dollars.

[hunter]

10. Very unfortunately we are not.

There's more than enough oil and natural gas in the ground to destroy this world as we know it.

I always thought that running out of oil would be a good thing.

[Hugin]

11. My biggest COVID takeaway...

Has been the human condition of “It is not a crisis, until it is a crisis.”

Humans live in a state of denial and reactive reflex. Driven by a retroactive scientific view at the expense of proactive prediction.

This has come about from various cultural factors and truths. Primarily when actions are taken and a crisis is averted (doesn’t happen) There always emerges a powerful accusation of “Hey, that thing you said was going to happen didn’t happen. You lied to us to make us do those things.” Also, there are those who rely on exploiting crisis to increase their power by falsely claiming to have some influence on events, if everyone will just do as they say.

A large majority of the US is now returning to partying like it’s 2019 with a global pandemic raging. Learning nothing and changing nothing despite the fact that has been shown to be unsustainable. Another pandemic which won’t be as subtle a certainty on the horizon.

I don’t know about peak oil or global warming, but, I can say nothing will be done until it is a crisis.

FAFO is how things work.

[maxsolomon]

13. well said.

the frog in a gradually heating pot of water analogy.

[Hugin]

16. To put it simply...

Yes.

[Caliman73]

12. Why is this not the top story every day, all the time?

There is more money in pushing the narrative that 1. We haven't hit peak yet. 2. Even when we hit peak, it will be a very slow decline and we will be fine. 3. Some new revolutionary technology will save us so might as well just do what we are doing. 4. We can't live without oil so shut up! Etc...

Too much money and influence in government right now by the fossil fuel industry.

[SoonerPride]

14. Because the world won't run out of oil for 50 years at the earliest

Something that far off gets no one's attention.

So it may as well be never.

[Amishman]

20. Because we were making the same claim 50 years ago

We keep finding more deposits and devising new ways of better using known deposits.

Anticipated but not proven shale oil deposits dwarf those known.

[womanofthehills]

24. Global warming is warming up Siberia

And whole towns are being constructed for drilling in Siberia - this will probably intensify global warming even more.

Russia’s national oil company has begun construction on a massive project in the Arctic that officials say will produce 25 million tons of oil each year by 2024. The new operation is possible only because the Arctic is now traversable in places and at times it previously wasn’t, due to sea ice levels plummeting as the planet warms. Hahahahha everything is fine!

https://gizmodo.com/russia-s-new-arctic-oil-development-is-a-nightmare-1846991892

[Polybius]

22. Maybe because we won't need oil in 2072?

My hope at least.

[womanofthehills]

26. The largest wind farm in the USA was constructed by Pattern Energy

Largest wind farm in US - however much of it is going out of state. I’m not sure what percentage is staying in NM - maybe none as all the press releases say it’s going to California.

U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich said, “The Western Spirit Transmission Line literally rewrote the energy landscape in New Mexico—allowing us to build four new utility-scale wind projects in central and eastern New Mexico that make up the largest single-phase wind project in all of North America. I was proud to support this project every step of the way. As we build more transformative infrastructure projects like this, New Mexico will grow our ability to export cleanly generated electrons to hungry energy markets in neighboring states and import thousands of good-paying jobs and billions of dollars of private investment back into our communities.”
“The largest wind power project in the entire country is now producing strong benefits for the state of New Mexico, including millions of dollars in tax revenue to local counties and school districts,” said Mike Garland, CEO of Pattern Energy. “This is just the beginning. We have committed to $6 billion in upcoming wind energy and related infrastructure projects in New Mexico over the next decade, putting thousands of people to work. Together, we are building a cleaner and more sustainable future.”

https://patternenergy.com/news/press-releases/western-spirit-wind-new-mexico-largest-renewable-project-us-history?fbclid=IwAR0E-EaW9KL4mgDDCrhcC8-geQkj4_S1ifBfaom907pAAbmIEbAF2fJq5S4

[NNadir]

23. The sooner the better. Peak oil paranoia is destructive in the...

...extreme.

[muriel_volestrangler]

25. because we must never forget fossil fuels effects on the environment

That's what you're missing. Using less oil will be a good thing. And proved oil reserves are still about the size they were at a peak in 1970:

Within the petroleum industry, proven oil reserves in the United States were 43.8 billion barrels (6.96×109 m3) of crude oil as of the end of 2018, excluding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.[1] The 2018 reserves represent the largest US proven reserves since 1972.[2] The Energy Information Administration estimates US undiscovered, technically recoverable oil resources to be an additional 198 billion barrels.[3][4]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_the_United_States

[womanofthehills]

27. NM has higher ozone levels from all the oil drilling in southeastern NM

And SW Texas.

[Emrys]

28. I live in Scotland.

Because of economic arguments around Scottish independence, there's been a pretty major focus on UK oil reserve potential for years.

During the last independence referendum, the No side claimed that there were about five years' reserves left, and anyway the price per barrel was so low at the time that it wouldn't be of any economic help to an independent Scotland. History intervened.

Since then, there's a standing joke among we independence supporters that the price and potential stocks of UK oil are inversely proportional to independence's standing in the polls. It has to be said, it generally checks out.

I'm a green-tinged independence supporter. The case for Scottish independence during the last referendum did not rely on putative income from oil and gas, it was a potentially helpful additional source of income (which we've seen very little of in all the years of drilling in the North Sea and beyond because the UK government didn't know - and had no interest in learning - how to exploit the resources lucratively, and was unable to even come up with workable scheme for a decent return from taxing the various multinationals' income from it).

In the end, I think we're far from depleting what's available if we're willing to drill hard enough, given technological advances in locating deposits and accessing them. Despite the projections around 2014, new North Sea and beyond fields are still being discovered and licences being doled out to this day.

That isn't the argument. We have alternatives - wind, tidal, geothermal, conservation and insulation etc. - and investing in them will give a much better return in the medium and long term than any amount of drilling and pumping, without many of the adverse and unpredictable ecological and economic effects.

The oil and gas left in the ground is a very valuable source of complex hydrocarbons whose potential in producing new useful materials we've yet to truly scratch, and will no doubt need in the future.

That's a better argument for leaving it in the ground for now than any projected extinction of resources at a constantly shifting future date.