Is the world’s supply of oil starting to run out? Yes.

As agriculture in the United States and Europe matured, the need for fertilizer grew exponentially. Guano, or sea bird droppings, was the answer. There were small guano sites in the Carolinas and other Southern states. But the mother lode was concentrated on the islands off the Peruvian coast, where light rainfall and thousands of years of sea bird droppings made for
the best fertilizer.

So it was that guano became a world commodity in the 19th century, and hundreds of thousands of tons were stripped from the Peruvian islands. Then it ran out. Luckily for farming, synthetic fertilizers were developed toward the end of the islands’ supply of guano.
…The facts about resource depletion are incontrovertible, and yet there are those who are in deep denial about the depletion of the world’s oil resources. In fact, it has become a tenet of some conservative thinking that global oil supplies are inexhaustible and not subject to the depletion seen in other natural resources, including copper, gold and silver. It is a heresy in some quarters to suggest that the irrefutable law of depletion applies to oil.

Vice President Cheney has scoffed at the idea. Influential conservative writers, like Irwin Stelzer of The Sunday Times of London and Tony Blankley of The Washington Times, frequently urge people to purchase large, inefficient SUVs.

Provo Daily Herald