Excellent and well based article.
What's amazing to me is that we argue over the numbers of where and when we run out of all economically accessible fossil fuels. The fact is that at some point (which has to be in the near term based on current production cost increase slopes) the cost of developing and processing fossil fuels will exceed their value to society. The volumes and dating is of little consequence, unless we aren't prepared to replace them with other energy sources - before this happens.
It's amazing that the first warnings of our fossil fuel tank approaching empty happened forty years ago - the little yellow light started flashing. Fossil fuel producers being the clever people they are - used the warning as marketing ploy to raise prices far beyond actual production/availability costs - and do still. This has created an artificial elasticity in fossil energy pricing. This does two things - it makes fossil fuel producers unimaginably wealthy and it allows fossil energy producers to stave off the competition from alternative energy producers by lowering the prices of their fossil energy products when alternative energy production costs approaches the market prices of fossil energy. The supply side economist - capitalist, see this as a normal function of the market place and that everything will fall into place - as fossil energy runs out alternative energy will smoothly replace it.
Unfortunately, the supply side economist aren't energy technicians and they over simplify the complexity of fossil energy product web. Many, many components of our modern society come from fossil derivatives - plastics and countless manufacturing and processing chemicals and 95% of our food supply is dependent on fossil dependent fertilizers, food processing chemicals and harvest energy. Moving to sustainable energy source doesn't provide these fossil products either at all, or within the same economic paradigms as fossil energy has. Therein in lies the potential for underestimating the difficulty of transitioning from fossil to alternative energies in a non-disruptive fashion. By failing to address the difficulties of this transition and postponing it ever closer to the finite end of fossil energy only shrinks the technical solution windows for the transition and compounds the disruptive affects of failure to replace fossil energy and its derivative products equally with alternative energy.
