Saw a guy today driving a monster SUV, Escalade or something, the rear license plate frame read " I love my 10 miles per gallon".

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I'm sick of .sig files

Looong article. I copied about half of it. The rest is at the boston.com

Oil Futures
Some experts believe the age of oil is near its end. Others insist that there are trillions of untapped barrels left -- and that the future of oil depends more on what happens above ground than below.
By Drake Bennett | February 26, 2006

ACCORDING TO ''The Prize," Daniel Yergin's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1991 history of the oil industry, the dawning of the automotive age was a time of deep pessimism about America's oil supply. World War I had just ended and few new fields had been discovered. Crude was in such short supply that some refineries were running at half capacity. ''Leading geologists," wrote Yergin, ''prophesied gloomily that the limits on US production were near."

Instead, the fear of shortage and the resulting rise of oil prices spurred the use of experimental prospecting techniques. The use of seismographs, aerial photography, improved drilling technology, and specialized inventions like the torsion balance and the magnetometer ushered in a new era of oil exploration, and the 1920s saw a rush of major American oil finds.

Yergin, the founder and chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a leading oil consultancy based in Cambridge, likes to tell this story to people who are worried that we have entered the final, terminal phase of exhausting the world's oil supply that we have passed the point of what experts call ''peak oil."

A lot of people are worrying these days. In public appearances the famed former Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens has declared that supplies are dwindling. Arjun Murti, a Goldman Sachs oil analyst who spooked markets last spring by predicting that oil could in 2007 rise to $105 a barrel, recently said that forecast might be conservative if the peak oil model is correct. Even President Bush, another former oilman, has been hinting that the age of oil is drawing to a close, following up last month's State of the Union speech in which he proclaimed that ''America is addicted to oil" with a barnstorming tour to talk up the benefits of wind and solar energy, ethanol, and a host of other alternative fuels.

And two weeks ago, Kenneth Deffeyes, a retired Princeton geology professor and leading ''peakist," announced on his website that, according to his calculations, global daily oil production passed into eclipse in December and began an inexorable, accelerating decline. The fact that the chairman of Kuwait's state oil company had conceded in November that the Burgan oil field, second-largest on the planet, was ''exhausted" only seemed to underline his point. As Deffeyes wrote, ''I can now refer to the world oil peak in the past tense. My career as a prophet is over. I'm now an historian."

But for many oil industry analysts, Yergin among them, talk about an imminent ''end of oil" is both premature and deeply wrongheaded. The history of oil exploration, they point out, has been defined by an ever-improving ability to wring more oil out of the earth and, when necessary, to use it more efficiently. In that sense, the size of the world's oil supply is shaped primarily by the interplay of geopolitics, economics, and technological innovation. As Yergin argues in an article in the forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs, it's these factors, rather than the limits of geology, that should concern us.

Yergin and other oil optimists concede that there may be very good reasons to curtail our use of oil climate change, for one, or instability in the Persian Gulf. But visions of dry wells should not be among them. As Michael Lynch, a fervent anti-peakist and the head of the Winchester-based energy consulting firm Strategic Energy & Economic Research, puts it, ''we've got enough oil out there to turn the planet into an Easy-Bake oven."

...

Worries about the oil supply running out are as old as the oil age. And they have sometimes been well founded. In 1956, M. King Hubbert, a former Shell research geologist then working at the US Geological Survey, predicted that US oil production capacity would peak in the early 1970s. Mostly ridiculed at the time, he turned out to be right: US production leveled off in 1970 and has been dropping ever since. Most of today's peakists make their forecasts at least in part by applying ''Hubbert's curve" (a bell curve in which production rises then falls as a direct function of remaining reserves) to the world supply.

The worry is not that we'll soon run out of oil in an absolute sense. The consensus view among peakists and anti-peakists alike is that the earth still contains 7 to 9 trillion barrels of oil, as against the 1 trillion we've already pumped out.

The debate, instead, is over how many of those remaining barrels are recoverable. Colin Campbell, a Scottish former oil industry geologist who is, along with Deffeyes, one of the best-known contemporary peakists, believes it's 850 billion. Exxon Mobil president Rex Tillerson has said it could be as high as 7 trillion.

The peak, these analysts point out, is not a matter of total numbers, but the rate at which we can get the oil out of the ground. The world has very little surplus oil capacity today. Fed by unexpectedly high demand from India and China, global consumption has grown briskly for the past several years, and if production levels off, a gap will open up between supply and demand. The result would be crippling shortages and oil prices far higher than any we've seen. According to Charles Maxwell, a widely respected oil industry analyst at the brokerage house Weeden & Company, a 2 percent shortfall can easily mean a 20 percent increase in price: ''Everyone around the world pays that huge penalty, in order to determine who's going to go without that 2 percent."

Maxwell himself thinks things will get pretty dire at that point a 20 percent spike, he says, ''means that people can't buy clothes and housing. It slows economic growth immeasurably. And God save us from the time when instead of going flat, production starts dropping off." Matthew Simmons, head of a Houston-based energy investing firm and a vocal oil pessimist, has sketched a future in which oil wars proliferate as supply tails off.

What I fear is peak gas at my am meeting, broccoli and cheese. phew.

What I fear is peak gas at my am meeting, broccoli and cheese. phew.

They say the third time is a charm!

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It's amazing how rapidly alternative sources are being developed. The biggest hurdle is the heavy equipment needed to do the work. Still numbers like 7/10 and 12 years pop up and that is a long time if any of the very tenuous sources are shut down. The market is on pins and needles to every little event. The consumption side is still like a tidal wave as population grows. No problems in 1800 at one billion. Some concern in 1950 at 2 billion. With 6.5 billion in 2000 headed for 9 in twenty years or so the people side of the equation is going parabolic with lots of issues to consider. It's truly a war of the worlds.

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"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
Marcus Aurelius