I have to vent, although it seems like you recognize this.

There's a very long list of things waiting for 'oil' to 'run out' to be useful. The short version is: at $2 retail, the list of known reserves worth tapping is measurable. And at $3 retail, the list is _provably_ larger. Much larger. Somewhere in here we start talking about oil shale, and the size of the oil shale reserves. Then about other forms of stored energy that could be converted into oil if need be... for more $$$ of course.

None of that violates thermo, or does anything else insane - it is just escalating along a progression of 'stored energy' where the timescale of the reserve is growing larger than the rate at which we actually use the energy. Predicting what will happen 50+ years out isn't profitable, especially when there's an emergency backup (nuclear) for if _all_ of the alternatives are infeasible. Which they wouldn't be... if we _were_ out of gas (Read: if gas was $5 retail).

If we were still growing corn ala the Anasazi, we would've run out of it a long, long time ago, also. What is Mr. Card's point, exactly? Without evolving technology, we'd still be burning mastadon-fat torches for light. Technology provides us with better means to utilize the finite resources that we have. Are we to be cursed because of it? That begs a different question: Why is it a "bad thing" to become more efficient? In a nutshell, it isn't. Besides, it hasn't been empirically proven that oil is, indeed, a 'fossil fuel.' There is evidence that the pressures and temperatures within the earth's crust actually produce what we call oil and that it is constantly replinishing some of the known oil reserves.

Al is right. Without the deleterious effects of batteries or the energy-dependent production of hydrogen, none of the alternative energy sources known constitute a "store" of energy that is so vital to the world economy. We can't capture the energy of the wind or the sun efficiently enough to be viable, and it doesn't look as if it will ever be. However, necessity produces results (ala the whale oil depletion/scarcity begetting the petroleum industry), and that could change. But that won't be a possibility until we have to do it...which won't happen for a very, very long time.

Predicting what will happen 50+ years out isn't even _possible_, really. Between efficiency improvements, new energy production and distribution technologies, new oil resource exploration, the chance for a new regulatory infrastructure which would make fission power viable again, and of course the possibility that one of the eternal chimerae of alternative energy might become a reality, there's no way to know for sure even what the _demand_ for oil will be 50+ years out.

But yes...what we do know for sure is that we're not running out of oil any time _soon_...the absolute worst case scenario that's even remotely supportable by the facts we already know is that we'll run out of "cheap" (by present day standards, anyway) oil.

Card is a smart guy, but he's off base. Once industry ramps up to get oil from shale, the cost will come down just from economies of scale, if not some sort of breakthrough.

Tim McNabb
fivehundredwords.com

"Run out" is a loaded term and misleading. When an economy runs out of something it happens in a different manner than when a car run out. The car stops, the economy changes. As supplies run low, the price will climb providing free market incentives to switch to alternatives. This may be tramatic but the availability of increasingly expensive oil will ease the transition and prevent the collapse of the global economy.