Eroei
freke said:
As far as I've read, the amount of oil potentially in the two major tar sands areas - if it were economically viable to exploit them - puts the upper limit of the oil reserve 'envelope' way above what most people believe.
First, I don't think anyone understands "peak" as "running out of oil"; the peak is understood as the point where the economics, and thus the politics, change dramatically, and many think we are reaching that point now (as evidenced by the non-conspiratorial, objectives-driven unfolding of various posturing actions on the global stage).
freke you are loosely rehashing economic arguments made by, for example, nanoespresso early in this thread. Our economic system, it's measures and how it motivates the expenditure of calories in the minds and muscles of men and women, exists within and is bounded by larger, more fundamental systems. Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) is already markedly down from what it was 50-60 years ago (to a factor approaching 1/20th of former return). See the annotated arguments of Richard Heinberg, for example, in
The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (to my knowledge not available on-line), or review the many fine links in this thread to primary sources on the matter. It doesn't matter how high the price of a barrel of oil once it costs the energy-equivalent of more than a barrel to find and extract it; at that point oil ceases to be a positive source of energy to drive the many gears of the Industrial Society that has allowed global population to more than triple these last 100 years. And nothing on the horizon, no known alternate energy source, comes anywhere near close to replacing the cheap kick of energy we got from oil. This spells coming change. Major change. Probably catastrophic change.
Supply is tremendous, and errors in quantifying that supply and estimating new discoveries will make "when we peak" a controversial subject until the real peak is long past and the evidence for it uncontroversial and irrefutable. So have we already peaked? Will it be in 10 years? 30? It remains controversial.
It is true that as oil prices rise investment will be made in extraction technologies that will improve efficiency, and this (along with deeper exploitation of known alternate energy sources) will soften the slope on the downward side of Hubbert's Peak, but the fact is EROEI is declining, and thus in the face of rising demand the net energy available is and will be subject to increasingly fierce competition as time goes by.
Unless a miracle occurs and some new form of cheap energy is found ("cheap" in terms of thermodynamics), we are left with the bloom-in-the-petri-dish phemomena (population overshoot) that could result in sudden, catastrophic declines in world population. A prudent society, then, should be planning for the worst while hoping for the best. And thus we enter the political realm.
I'd argue that our elites are much more prudent than some would like us to believe (even if tragically comic in execution). Note that the plans we've unfortunately seen unfold over the last 20+ years (and especially since 12 December 2000) don't seem to include thought for the welfare of the many, but appear (to me) more akin to a circling of the wagons in preparation for coming resource wars (e.g., U.S. violently positioning new global garrisons).
This isn't "conspiracy". And it isn't "simply oil" (as the human world remains intractably complex). However, call it prophesy, a reading of the tea leaves of history and current events leading to a speculative extrapolation: As the dearly departed HST said,
Big Dark Coming, Soon.
Aye. Maybe I'll mail him myself and ask him what he thinks of 
