ïìOil Explorers Searching Ever More Remote Areas,î by Jad Mouawad, New York Times, 9 September, p. C1.

One of the responses I get a lot to the brief is that shrinking the Gap is unrealistic because we'd need . . . like . . . five earths to support all that development! One of the alarms typically sounded in this approach is: we're running out of oil.

The main evidence for this is that big oil discoveries are becoming more rare, as oil companies, bitten dramatically by the under-$10-a-barrel prices that came out of the Asian Flu of 1997-98, have gotten a lot more stingy in terms of both exploration and development since then--meaning they look for certain payoffs and simply don't accept risk like they did. Does having oil at $40-a-barrel or higher lately increase that risk taking? Not as much as you'd think, at least so far.

Why not? Oil companies more and more think of themselvs as energy companies, so it's all about making money off energy, not just about oil. Oil is only really about transportation in the global economy (plus petrochemicals and industrial feedstocks), whereas the gas and coal and renewables are all about electricity, which continues to grow all over world and not just in emerging markets going car-happy like China is right now (we got stuck in plenty of traffic jams when we were there in August). Transportation is moving toward hydrogen, with hybrids as the half-step, and that sense of historical momentum doesn't exactly make energy companies want to go out on major long-term investment "limbs" for oil like they used to, and that reticence will only grow, I think.

You can say that much of these restrictions on drilling and exploration are self-imposed (environmental concerns, countries isolated by economic sanctions), and you'd be right. If we didn't have such restrictions, we'd be finding and exploiting oil all over the dial, but those considerations aren't easily swept aside, so the underinvestment pattern continues, soon--I would argue--to be overwhelmed historically by a sense of clear momentum to hydrogen, which will come from natural gas, which is all over the world and not just in "Muslim countries."

So our collective decision making (environmental, political, economic, social) are all working against oil production, and over time, as emerging markets like China bump up against some real capacity limits, you'll see that pain and desire translated, perhaps far faster than anyone realizes today, into heightened momentum toward hydrogen-fueled cars.

So it won't be the end of the world, nor the end of cars, nor the end of anything really. But it will be the start of some amazing new global rule sets.