He mistakenly said: “There is, by all accounts, plenty of oil on the market. There are no shortages except those manufactured for television by the oil industry, Wall Street, the Banks, and casino operators to keep us from squeaking too loudly about the big ripoff at the pump.” And this is entirely incorrect.

To be fair, he was referencing the oil “on the market.” And truthfully there IS enough oil “on the market” TODAY to meet the oil demands of TODAY. But because he is only focusing on the short term, he failed to grasp the big picture, which is that when oil gets sucked out from the Earth’s crust via a human oil extraction project, the amount of time needed for it to travel from that oil field to a tanker/pipeline, and then into “the market” (specifically the global crude oil auctions) is mere weeks. So he is being very shortsighted in his perceptions of where oil ultimately comes from — the ground. And it’s beneath the ground where we now find ourselves running into bigger and more complicated problems all the time now.

There IS a shortage of oil. Specifically, we are growing progressively much short on what is known as CONVENTIONAL oil. All that remains in the Earth’s crust now is the unconventional stuff. Very hard to get at, very expensive to get out of the ground, very expensive to deliver in a halfway manageable form to a refinery, and very expensive to cram through that refinery.

The Earth hit its peak in conventional oil back in 2006. So the amount of conventional oil now left in the Earth’s crust for us to find and extract is only shrinking all the faster every year going forward. Unconventional oil is pretty much all that remains now for our future. And no oil company wants to admit that, even though they know it’s the truth. The reason they don’t want to admit it is that unconventional oil will be their undoing.

Here’s why ….

The current structure of the entire global economy is desperately reliant upon oil on two crucial levels:

1) oil MUST be cheap
2) oil MUST be plenteous

But now that our planet’s stores of conventional oil have been exhausted into terminal decline, all oil from here onward will be neither cheap nor plenteous. And thus the current structure of the entire global economy is threatened. Even the military security of all industrialized nations will be threatened. We are right now witnessing the dawn of a new era of energy constraints, economic upheavals, and global unrest of the sort that will not merely be limited to Third World nations. Modern industrialized nations will each suffer violent unrest as this new era of energy scarcity takes hold of ALL economies:

— local economies
— regional economies
— national economies
— Third World economies
— Developing world economies
— First World economies

There is no facet of human civilization that will not be impacted during the course of the next 10 – 15 years as these upheavals start to manifest themselves. Companies will go broke. Factories will shut down. Shipping will become unreliable. All of modern society will downgrade –slowly and painfully, over the course of about a decade– into a bitter state of has-been-hood, a pathetic shadow of what used to be.

The direness of this crisis is so severe that these privately-held oil companies, which are just puny little operations, are fearful of the day coming when oil operations will get subjected to the dreaded “n”-word: nationalization. Governmental bodies will soon nationalize (take over) the last few remaining private oil companies in the world (those include BP, Shell, Mobil, Chevron, Texaco, and Total) and will transform them into government-owned operations just like Saudi Aramco, and Pemex and Gazprom and Petrbras and Statoil (to name a few). The reason governments will do this is because oil is more than just a commodity to be traded for personal profit. It is a strategic resource of dire military importance. Nations have failed due to a lack of oil. (Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because of oil. And Nazi Germany finally surrendered to the Allies because we choked off Germany’s oil supply, and so the Nazi war machine LITERALLY ran out of gas.) Does anyone here really think the military leaders of the Free World will sit still as the one and only Achilles’ Heel of a resource to their daily operations gets priced out of their reach? The world currently consumes over 87 million barrels per day, and the US consumes 20 million of that 87 million. And while the exact number of barrels per day that the United States Armed Forces currently consumes is NOT available for public knowledge, it has been confirmed repeatedly that the US Military is THE Number One consumer of oil per day in the world with a per-soldier average of 100 barrels of oil per day per soldier in the field. A convoy of 100 military vehicles crossing the deserts of Iraq will easily include 60 or even 90 trucks which are JUST carrying oil or some form of petroleum-derived fuel.

Steve Browning, one of the other readers who commented on this article, was correct: without these energy sources, we would live in a dark, dank world. What he failed to mention is that out of all forms of energy, it’s oil –especially the cheap and plenteous oil– which is the most pivotal form of energy. And without it our entire way of life is capable of collapsing literally overnight.

We will NOT see an overnight collapse simply because we will not experience an overnight disappearance of cheap and plenteous oil. We instead will experience a slow-motion train wreck spread out over a generation marked by grief and devastation.

And the environmental costs of renewable energy are covered many times over by what they offset.

Thanks for taking time to comment.