I highly recommend that everyone read John Quiggin's coal-focused corrective to the peak-oil crowd, it's a nice dose of calm in one of those weird issues that's simultaneously ignored by most Americans and then hyped to hysterical levels by those involved in it (see this Salon story for more on that).
The basic shape of the river is this: oil is finite. At some point, we will have used up 50%+1 of the world's reserves, and we will then be on the downward sloping side of the "peak." According to some calculations, that either has happened, or will quite shortly. There'll still be loads of oil left, but it'll be increasingly complicated and expensive to extract. Certain folks have made this into a veritable eschatology, crying that peak oil will detonate civilization as we know it, hurling the advanced world back into a crude, dystopic existence not seen since the medieval period. Certain other folks believe them. They are wrong.
Too often, the counter-arguments here rely on untested, or unproven, technologies. There's a strange tendency to seek salvation in futurism and futurism alone. Thus, you have the hype around the hydrogen economy, cellulosic ethanol, biofuels, and all the rest. Make no mistake, these are promising, potent, technologies, but none are sure bets. Nevertheless, there's no shortage of energy sources in the world, some are just less economical than others. Use of wind, nuclear, solar, tidal, natural gas, ethanol, and all the rest could be heavily ramped up and subsidized during an energy crisis. Extreme conservation measures could be rapidly implemented. But, in the end, we know what we'd turn to: coal.
John lays out the flexibility and uses of coal in great detail over at his place. Suffice to say, coal can power basically everything we use, and it's unimaginably plentiful. It can even be transformed into gas, through techniques that are rapidly becoming economical. Coal's cost comes in its CO2 emissions, which warm the planet and could eventually render us all screwed. But new technologies, notably gasification (which could allow it to run cars), render carbon extraction and sequestration fairly straight-forward, so that problem, at least in theory, is pretty surmountable. Don't believe me? Ask the National Resources Defense Council.
None of this is to downplay the costs or dangers of an energy crunch, but we're not teetering on the brink of oblivion just because we use a lot of oil. Alternatives are plentiful, just not cheap. But as petroleum becomes more scarce and increasingly pricey, the relative expense of its competitors will start looking a whole lot better.
Cross-Posted From Tapped
