Sounds pretty close to a "quibble" to me, Kevin.

Whatever it sounds like, it isn't. Extractive industries are always in the business of using up a resource that isn't being replaced. They are not manufacturing that resource. It won't last for ever - and in the case of oil it appears pretty clear that it won't last very long. There's that famous quote about how the stone age didn't end because of a shortage of stone, but oil is in much shorter supply than stone ever was.

Twenty years? Fifty years? One hundred years? The lifetime of the children of children being born today? Not a chance, even at the present rate of use. That's just a heartbeat away.

That's the crisis. Not fantasies about keeping hold/grabbing hold of dwindling supplies for one nation rather than another, just to hold off the inevitable for just a few years longer.

There are alternatives, and the longer it takes adjusting so as to use them, the harder it is going to be. If there is something about the economic system that makes that kind of adjustment difficult, because of short-term profit considerations, that needs fixing too.

Of course the problem is that short-term considerations dominate politics even more than they do business, if anything.