Peak Oil

We might want to think about this:

Though experts disagree about when daily oil output will reach its maximum level -- or whether they have done so already -- the Government Accountability Office said in a report that most studies have found oil production will reach a peak sometime between now and 2040.

The report warns that, as the world's largest oil consumer, the U.S. is vulnerable to significant economic troubles, brought about by rising prices, if a peak arrives and no technology exists to replace petroleum-based transportation fuels.

There are plenty of folks out there who say it might be sooner than that. Interestingly, a lack of oil may accelerate greenhouse gas emissions according to some:

In fact peak oil could even make emissions worse if it drives us to exploit the wrong kinds of fuel.

Burning rainforest and peatlands to create palm oil plantations for biofuels releases vast amounts of CO2, and has already made Indonesia, according to some ways of calculating it, the world's third biggest emitter after the US and China.

Synthetic transport fuels made from natural gas using the Fischer-Tropsch process emit even more carbon on a well-to-wheels basis than conventional crude; and when the feedstock is coal, the emissions double. ...

Although these fuels are likely to prove inadequate, we may be driven to use them because cleaner alternatives are even more inadequate, for a variety of reasons.

Biofuels can be produced sustainably and with real CO2 reductions, but in the industrialised world there simply isn't the land.

In the developing world, however, there are vast swathes of land which could be put to sugar cane in a sustainable fashion; but the scale of the task of replacing crude oil would still be monumental.

I calculate that to substitute the fuel lost through a post-peak oil production annual decline of 3% would mean planting about 200,000 sq km - equivalent to the land area of Cuba, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea - every year.

Alternatively, if we decided to run Britain's road transport system, say, on cleanly produced hydrogen - electrolysing water using non-CO2-emitting forms of generation - our options would be:

67 Sizewell B nuclear power stations
a solar array covering every inch of Norfolk and Derbyshire combined
or a wind farm bigger than the entire southwest region of England.