Let me tell you what I've been learning about oil, and
by oil, we always mean "light sweet crude" which is the
top-floating 20% of all oil reserves that is cheap to
pump, cheap to refine and the basis for all affordable
energy on this planet. The thicker muck that lies below
the "light sweet crude" is full of sulfur, much more
difficult to extract and very VERY expensive to refine.
In fact, "heavy sour crude" is only used to make
asphalt and other industrial use lubricants because it
simply costs too much to get the gasoline out of it. But
when various companies announce their "oil reserves" it
always sounds like a lot, but ask them how much of
their reserves are light sweet crude, they won't tell
you. Wells are capped when the sweet stuff is gone.

Here's more: The average bite of food travels 1,500
miles to get to your mouth (that's a whole lot of
trucking). Almost all Wal-Mart items travel at least
3,000 miles before you buy them. It takes 7 gallons of
oil to make a single automobile tire. Every new car
requires 1,200 gallons of gasoline just to manufacture
it! Oil has kept our swelling populations fed because
pesticides and fertilizers are made with oil. Synthetic
fabrics, all plastics, rubber and computer chips could
not be manufactured without oil (computer chips alone
use 60 times their weight in fossil fuels just in the
manufacturing process.) The list goes on and on.

This world is hopelessly addicted to oil. What about
alternative fuels? Solar? Wind? Wave energy? Hydrogen?
Those things are terrific, but inadequate to power the
nations of the world. You can't make plastic with
sunshine, wind can't generate enough electricity and
hydrogen only has 60% of the BTUs that gasoline does,
and therefore even if an engine could be built to run
on hydrogen efficiently (note: "efficiently") we'd
still have to re-tool our entire gasoline distribution
system to provide hydrogen to fuel 800,000,000 brand
new hydrogen automobiles that must be built... using
oil. And hydrogen is such a tiny molecule, no container
can hold it without leaking about 4% a day. (the dirty
secret about hydrogen is that it requires a whole lot
of electricity to produce it... where does electricity
come from? mostly fossil fuels!)

Here's a fun fact: How much oil does the world use in a
day? 88 million barrels. How much oil does the world
pump out of the ground in a day? 89 million barrels.
Add that up and we use a BILLION BARRELS OF OIL every
12 days. How much longer do you think we can continue
to pump 32,120,000,000 barrels of oil a year? Forever?
This is what is commonly referred to as "Peak Oil", the
point at which we can't pump as much oil as is needed.
Consumption of oil is estimated to grow at 3
to 5% a year for the forseeable future (especially with
China and India getting the hots for automobiles and
abandoning their bicycles). Production of oil is widely
thought to be at about it's peak level right now (89
million barrels a day). So what happens next year and
the year after when we require 92 million barrels a
day, but only 89 million are available? What about when
the spread grows wider?

Anyway, Peak Oil is something I've been interested in
of late. A super book I liked a lot was Michael
Ruppert's CROSSING THE RUBICON, about the decline of
oil. The DVD "End of Suburbia" documentary was a
fascinating look at how the suburbs grew because of
cheap gas for cars and how that will collapse when the
50 mile commute is no longer affordable, and trucks
can't supply the mountains of stuff the suburbs need.

PEAK OIL web sites I follow closely:

FROM THE WILDERNESS

LIFE AFTER THE OIL CRASH

PEAK OIL DOT NET

Another great web site for other eclectic issues and writings:
The Environmental & Peace Education Center

KUWAIT'S BIGGEST OIL FIELD STARTS TO RUN DRY