The short oil shortage in the 70s has done our economy an awful lot of good in the long run. More efficient energy use, research on new energies etc. I only wish the OPEC would reduce its output more often.

Some here seem to think that the amount of oil reserves is a fixed number which can be depleted completely. In a very crude verbatim sense that is true, but completely irrelevant. If you think about it from the point of view of economy the oil reserves are infinite. The known oil reserves vary largely depending upon which amount of money you want to spend to extract them. What will happen if the cheap reserves are exploited? Then oil gets more expensive, alternative sources of energy become efficient alternatives to oil and expensive oil will only be used for other things than cheap transport. Whenever a resource gets scarce, the price explodes and that, on the one hand, will make alternatives to this resource competitive and, on the other hand, other quarries for that resource exploitable.

The very reasons that make our economy tick will dictate that a resource of the type of oil can never be completely depleted. It only becomes prohibitively expensive for most uses. With animals, the situation is completely different, for several reasons. A species can be "depleted" forever (at least with toda's standards). That worries me much more than oil becoming scarce.

The depletion stand of some here is a bit outdated. Way back in the seventies in all those books (limits of growth etc.) about depletion of resources that type of thinking can be read. I remember a couple of natural resources which only were to last for a shorter time than has passed since the publication of these books.

Take for instance Holdren who was then a know figure among environmentalists and still is.
In 1971 (Energy: A crisis in power), he was writing it is fair to conclude that under almost any assumptions, the supplies of crude petroleum and natural gas are severely limited. The bulk of energy likely to flow from these sources may have been tapped within the lifetime of many of the present population.
Recently, he has written The energy problem is not primarily a matter of depletion of resources in any global sense but rather of environmental impacts and sociopolitical risks.

I share the environmental worries of many here, but I find your approach to the problem a bit simple.

I'm all for expensive oil for many reasons. Even for economical. It would do us good. By the way, even the oil companies could profit from expensive oil. I'd rather sell an expensive and scarce product to high prices than a cheap one to low prices.

Wolfgang