Originally Posted by TSGracchus

Read the fine print, folks. It's shale oil. It's not a new discovery, it's just that until the price of oil soared through the roof, it couldn't be extracted at a profit. Now it can. So what?

The problem is not that we're running out of oil, but that we're running out of cheap oil. Approximately 50% of the oil that was in the ground when we started pumping it is still there (that's what "oil peak" means -- not that all the oil is gone, but that half of it is, and what's left is harder and more expensive to pump). But what made oil such a wonderful energy source for so many years is that it was both plentiful and cheap, and it ain't no more.

Not a solution. We need to increase efficiency, and switch to non-fossil-fuel sources of energy. The time to start doing that was 30 years ago, but since we can't turn the clock back, we need to start now.