Radical Noesis - Thinking outside the box

From the interview:

Roscoe Bartlett: Although there's a lot of oil left in the world, and we agree that there's roughly 900 to 1,000 gigabarrels of oil left in the world, you need to put that in context. Up until the Carter years, every decade, we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. Now, with exponential growth, if you're at about a 7 percent growth rate, and we were using oil at about 7 percent more per year, the world was, that explains how we got on that curve. Now, the fact that we have about half of all the oil that was ever in the world still there, doesn't mean that the next 50 years, 100 years are going to be like the last 50 years, 100 years, because the world is now demanding a whole lot more oil. Last year, China increased their use probably 25 percent. In less than three years, that doubles their use of oil. They probably won't continue on that growth path, but India's increasing. China's now the No. 2 importer in the world. What are the consequences of this? Boy, economic and geopolitical. When the world recognizes that there's only so much oil that can be produced, and we need more oil -- by the way, if our economy doesn't grow at least 2 percent a year, we can't service our debt. And if we don't think the economy's growing at 2 percent a year, the stock market starts tanking. You know, we have to get used to the fact that there is not going to be oil in the quantities there have been in the past available in the future, and we should have started a long time ago, 'cause we knew -- the world knew -- by at least 1980, that M. King Hubbert was right about our country. If he's right about the United States, why shouldn't he be right about the world? And we should have been doing some things that we've now blown 25 years, that we could have been doing some very meaningful things to prepare for this time when the world reaches its peak ability to produce oil. We didn't do those things then. We really need to start doing them now.