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It's not so much that the oil fields will simply dry out in the near future. It's theorized that we will soon reach the point where the peak oil production economically allowed begins to diminish. Once that starts happening, there will be drastic economic consequences, such as the cheap energy that is currently the fundamental enabling source of our entire world economy will no longer be cheap. Peak oil is a real potential problem, although the author is a bit, ahem, overenthusiastic about exactly how much of a problem it will be.

All the alarmism about global warming, and also about "peak oil" has had me worried lately. But suddenly I realized there's nothing to worry about!

When we run out of oil in twenty years, we'll stop producing greenhouse gasses, and global warming will be abated!

Problem solved!

True. However, the USGS is notorious in peak oil circles for having continued to raise estimates of ultimate recoverables (IE, total production possible over human history) in the continental US, even after domestic production had reached and passed the predicted Hubbert Peak (IE, the halfway mark). The USGS 1972 predicted US-48-UR was a value between 2 and 10 times the value currently accepted. (Hubbard, by contrast, was about 10-30% low... from a range of 15 years pre-peak.) And, if you examine the weasel words in their footnotes, you'll see the USGS and similar agencies effectively admit to fixing their supply predictions to equal the value for predicted demand. We're at the absolute brink of Peak Oil. It would also provide a plausible secondary motivation for the Iranian nuclear program, and explain why they are so adamant about pursuing the atom despite having one of the world's largest oil reserves: they also think that Peak Oil is at hand.

If world oil consumption continues to increase at an average rate of 1.4 percent a year, and no further resources are discovered, the world's oil supply will not be exhausted until the year 2056.

This, however, assumes that oil production can remain steady, and that those reseve estimates are accurate. The premise of the Hubbert peak is that production rates will begin dropping at increasing rates, due to increasing difficulty in extraction.

I don't have time to address the problems with each of your silver linings, but looking at a few Peak Oil sites and a quick search for "Energy Profit Ratio" should leave many people skeptical about them.

Which, in Realpolitik terms, might well justify the invasion of Iraq completely, aside from the stupidity how the invasion was executed (IE, without detailed post-invasion planning or comrehensive allied support). And, no, I am NOT a fan of Bush or the Iraq war... largely because of the aforementioned stupidity in execution.

From what I hear, the "peak oil" crisis stands a decent chance of obliterating human society as we know it before any of this wonderful stuff can happen. I would love it if someone would make a good argument why this isn't the case, but I've yet to hear one.

That's true now, but it's not going to last forever.

The more we conserve now, the longer that will last.

No I'm not a doomsday crank. Peak oil is here now no matter how much we wish it werent true.

Don't be planning too far ahead.

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
http://www.peakoil.net/
http://www.peakoil.org/
http://www.peakoil.com/
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/20 05/04/08/BUGA4C50P61.DTL/

Do a lot of reading, make up your own mind.

At the present rate of oil consumption, which is increasing by the way, the crude oil reserves will be exhausted in about 20 years.

Too bad the rate of production will decrease, not increase, starting right about now. That brings on a slightly different set of problems, of course. But it does mean that our oil reserves won't get used up within 20 years :-)

But long before that, there will start to be not enough to go around.

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we are not in a battle against entropy here pal, we are in a battle against waste build up.

With enough energy we could bury the waste miles deep or shoot it into space.

We don't have that kind of energy. Have you seen this? http://peakoil.org/

I don't know how much the car itself will change from a design sense (if that's what is meant by 'look like'), and I'm not sure how much the act of driving a car will change.

It does seem that there is a trend toward all these 'driver aid' tools, like GPS systems and ubiquitous Big Brother-like organizations that can control your car and track you. I do think, therefore, that the act of driving is going to be considerably less free, as an experience.

The real change will be under the hood, as Peak Oil passes, and the petroleum supplies begin to dwindle rather than grow (there are currently zero large oil fields set to come online in 2008, and only one in 2007, so it might be here faster than we think). I'd expect, therefore, that cars will become a luxury commodity once again, as the cost of powering them starts to become prohibitively expensive.

As this happens, there will likely be another trend in the 2010s similar to the 1980s, when there was a premium placed on economy, rather than size, because if the price of gas balloons in the 2010s to something more like $5-$7 a gallon, as some in the oil industry predict, it means saving a 10 MPG increase in economy can make a dig difference to the TCO of an automobile.

Well, was Desert Storm to preserve our freedom? If Saddam had continued to occupy Kuwait after we gave him the green light to take it, would anyone here in America have lost any freedom whatsoever? Well, we might have ended up paying higher prices for gas or -- oh the horror -- been forced to employ Americans to work here in America to pump up American oil.

Does anyone remember the economy in Texas when oil was a booming industry here? I do, and it was nice. Having jobs to put food on the table and keep a roof over your head...with enough left over to save up for the future or send your kids off to college, that sounds like freedom; and instead of keeping that here in America, we closed down entire towns and exported the jobs to the OPEC nations...the very nations that openly despise us.

-In 1980 UCS predicted that the earth would soon run out of fossil fuels. "It is now abundantly clear," the group wrote, "that the world has entered a period of chronic energy shortages." Oops! Known reserves of oil, coal and natural gas have never been higher, and show every sign of increasing.

Oil reserves show every sign of increasing?

You might want to look
here: http://www.hubbertpeak.com/
here: http://www.peakoil.org/
or here: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/061203_s immons.html