In 1906 my grandfather, aged 16, was told by his father that, no, he couldn't get a job in the motor car industry, there was no future in it. Well, it's taken 100 years, but Robbie Young was proved right, there was no future in it! (Charlie Young became, until his stomach turned, a butcher for a while, then a coal miner, two more industries with no ultimate future!)
Discussions about oil on HuffPo seem to get tangled up because several different themes are treated as one. Let me try to disentangle a little.
The oil companies are bad people, no doubt about it. They manipulate both prices and public opinion, their sole aim in life, and to hell with the planet, to multiply the billions of dollars they earn by increasingly big numbers. As Raymond Learsy keeps pointing out, the price can be manipulated in various ways (especially when you control all aspects of the process from well to tank) including through futures markets. And yes, they may well be manipulating prices to get election outcomes that permit them to carry on business as usual. Big corporations, through their mouthpieces in the media, have after all been manipulating elections (and wars) all over the world for at least the last 100 years to get economic and social environments that suit their purposes. Both oil company executives, and the leaders of countries like Saudi Arabia, appear to have absolutely no conscience about what they are doing (to environment or society), and the money keeps rolling in. When I see the sums of money being made by the individuals concerned I always wonder 'when is enough enough?', what can you possibly do with those grotesque sums - certainly not pass through the eye of a needle. I mean, yes, the first million, I can see the attraction, and perhaps the second million, and maybe even the third, but after that?
Right, oil companies = bad people, no question. But here's where the second part of the tangle often comes in. The amount of oil, under the ground, is limited. It came into being at a particular time in geological history (no, it was more than 6000 years ago, pay attention you at the back), and represents the vegetation , or part of it, that was growing at that time. It isn't still being formed, it isn't being topped up from a big oil can in the sky, what there was is what there is, and what there will be. We don't know exactly how much we started with, on this car journey, how much was in the tank, so to speak, so we don't know how far we can drive on what we have left, the gauge having given up the holy ghost. All we do know is that, somewhere on a long and increasingly dusty highway, the car will come to a sputtering stop and die. No future as my great-grandfather said. Geologists can make some estimates relating what they think is in the tank to the speed we are driving, and how much gas the car uses per mile, and the best estimates say that we are, or are just about to be, at the half way point. And since we are driving faster and faster, hoping to get to the next town before the petrol runs out, it will run out faster and faster. So, nothing to do with greed, nothing to do with manipulation, everything to do with simple geology and even more simple mathematics. (Incidentally, what do the fundamentalists believe about oil? Do they believe it formed in 6000 years, or was it created, as a kind of godly surprise present, to be unwrapped later. 'Oh look, god made oil for us to make our cars go, wasn't that thoughtful'?).
And the third part of the tangle, of course, is climate change. When oil formed it preserved the CO2 that had been locked up in the vegetation at the time. By burning it we have released, so far, roughly half the CO2 from the ancient Earth's atmosphere, and added it to the CO2 of the modern atmosphere. Simple chemistry. Releasing that half has already had a major impact on the climate of the Earth as we all know. Releasing the other half, whether that takes place over the next 100 years, or 50, or 20, depending on which geologists got their sums right, is going to have an even more devastating effect, particularly because the increasing temperatures are also releasing methane (currently held in frozen ground), and partly because the decreasing forest cover of the Earth means that less CO2 can be absorbed than might have been the case even in 1906, and partly because the oceans are becoming saturated with CO2 (more simple chemistry) and can't take up much more (incidentally, simple chemistry also tells us that absorbing CO2 into water creates acidity, and the increasingly acidic oceans are going to have drastically reduced marine life).
These simple facts about the greenhouse gases also have nothing to do with evil oil men (a tautology), except in so far as part of their evil way has been to stop the truth coming out about global warming for as long as possible while salting away ever more squillions of dollars for some unknown purpose. In doing this they have again been abetted by the main stream media. We have to stop the release of as much of that second half of CO2 as possible. Now this may, almost certainly will, cause gas prices to rise again. But this time they will be rising not to line the pockets of oil company executives and sheiks but to save the planet. No one should be arguing for the finding of new resources whether offshore or in Alaska or anywhere else, nor for the use of oil shales or coal or natural gas liquefaction, in order to try to pretend that oil supplies are in fact infinitely large, and gas prices should therefore be infinitely small. If technology or price or the wickedness of Alaskan politicians does make it possible to find additional sources of oil, then we are putting more nails in the planet's coffin.
So next time you get into an argument in a bar, or at a ball game, or in a HuffPo thread, or at a political rally, try to keep the arguments focused on one of those strands at a time, and keep your eye on the main game. Personally I don't care if oil company executives are buried in gold coffins, or if increasingly genuinely scarce resources push gas prices to the point where car manufacturers (who are, of course, also evil) have to think seriously about efficiency and hybrid technologies. But I do care if burning the rest of that oil (and coal, for which the same arguments apply) drives this planet on the downward spiral to become the second Venus in the solar system.
One Venus is enough for any small planetary system, undistinguished but with delusions of grandeur, on the outer arm of a very big galaxy in an even bigger universe. But perhaps god is testing the fundamentalists by putting oil in the ground, like an apple on a tree, to see if they can resist the temptation to burn it all and lose the planet.
I know the oil companies can't resist temptation, can the rest of us?