[gerv]

There's more oil in them there hills then we're led to believe. Americans have more oil then what is said. They won't drill or produce it until most of the other countries have ran out. They'll be in control then. Canada also has loads of it.

[bootlegga]

It doesn't matter how much oil is in the ground, it matters how much you can produce today to use tomorrow. As it stands, we can barely produce enough to keep up with day to day demand.

Most of the easy to get at oil has already been tapped, and what's left is in either difficult places to drill (like the Arctic), small fields that cost a lot more per barrel to produce (because of the costs to develop a field), or worst of all, unconventional oil like the oil sands and oil shale.

[andyt]

The article I quoted says that peak oil happens when 1/2 half the oil has been extracted. They expect that to happen around 2015, but admit it's all a guessing game. But before we hit peak oil we're already going to have disruptions.

The dilemma is that if the world economy is booming, countries like China and India will have the same thirst for oil that we do. The only way to reduce demand for oil is to have a serious economic donwn turn.

That's the problem with the people who refute Malthus and say we'll always find a technological fix for our problems. If all the current world population were to live at Canada's standard we would need about 4 planets worth of resources just to supply the current population.