The Impending Mother of All Oil Shocks

The other day I had an interesting conversation with someone who decides how much a small but significant portion of the world’s oil reserves gets pumped.

I asked a question, “So long as the revenue from the oil that you pump is enough to meet the immediate needs of your country, why pump more?”

My point was that as the prospect of running out of easy-to-extract oil starts to hit the collective consciousness, and as demand creeps up (as it will), oil will spike again, and again. So why not just wait?

And yes – sure there are new sources, such as oil shale in Canada and deep oil off Brazil, but in any quantity sufficient to make a difference that stuff costs easily $70 a barrel to get out…and then? There are plenty of people that acknowledge that there is a serious problem (for example here and here) but little is being done apart from denial, except that soon radical action may be necessary