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ORIGINAL: SirKenin
Supply is either finite or increasing.  What is in the ground is in the ground.  The only thing that will change is how much we discover.

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ORIGINAL: CrappyDom
In addition, if you look at the RATE at which new oil is being discovored it is falling, combine that with the unexpected surge in demand and  you ARE looking at peak oil being reached far sooner than anyone expected.

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you ARE looking at peak oil being reached far sooner than anyone expected.

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ORIGINAL: NorthernGent
D4US,
There is no oil "shortage", just as there was no oil "shortage" in the early 1970s or the early 1990s. There are our own apprehensions. And then there are the facts of the matter.
According to a paper in the latest edition of Science magazine, proven world oil reserves exceed one trillion barrels. Overall, the paper reckons that the world retains more than three trillion barrels of recoverable oil resources.
Far from oil "running out" as some might have it, the big story of the oil industry over the past 50 years has been the way in which technological change has continuously worked, not only to yield up new discoveries but also to upgrade the size and extent of existing fields.
The paper, Never Cry Wolf - Why the Petroleum Age is Far from Over, cites the example of the Kern River field in California, first discovered in 1899. Calculations in 1942 suggested that 54 million barrels remained. In fact, over the next 44 years the field produced 736 million barrels and in 1986 was reckoned to have another 970 million barrels remaining.
From 1981 to 1996, the estimated volume of oil in 186 well-known giant fields across the world discovered before 1981 rose from 617 to 777 billion barrels - and this without new discoveries.
This trend, the paper argues, is likely to continue. For example, the Kashagan field in Kazakhstan was deemed in the second half of the 1990s to hold between two and four billion barrels. In 2002 , after completion of only two exploration and two appraisal wells, estimates were officially raised to between seven and nine billion barrels. In February this year, after four more exploration wells in the area, they were raised again to 13 billion barrels.
Recovery rates from fields worldwide have also increased, from about 22 per cent in 1980 to 35 per cent today.
So why the panic? The real issue, says the article, is that neither major producing countries nor the big oil companies have been keen to invest money in substantial exploration campaigns. One reason has been the fear of creating permanent excess capacity such as in the mid-1980s, when the oil price tumbled to just $10 a barrel.
Another is inaccessibility to foreign investment of the largest and cheapest reserves. Yet another is the pressure on publicly-quoted oil companies to concentrate on short-term performance.

Disclaimer - the above is not my work and I have shamefully copied and pasted it.
 
Regards

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ORIGINAL: CrappyDomAmerica actually has the largest supplies of oil, greater than Saudi Arabia in fact but we can't refine it, as it is in shale in Colorado. 

• Saudi Arabia (261,444 millions of barrels);
  
• Iraq (112,000 millions of barrels);
  
• United Arab Emirates (97,800 millions of barrels);
  
• Kuwait (96,500 millions of barrels);
  
• IR Iran (92,600 millions of barrels).

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So this is an ideological movement, a movement that has an intellectual rationale to it?
Of course. It is something like on the other side and in most ancient times, what became the Crusades against the Middle East has little to [do] with Catholicism per se. It was a political doctrine to fight for the faith, but it was not the faith by itself.
Islam is something, and Salafiyya is something else. And also one should remember that all the Salafists are not jihadi. Some of them believe that the world would be better if things were run like the prophet run them in the two holy cities of Medina and Mecca in the sixth century of the Christian era, but still they don't want to kill you for that. And only part of the Salafists are violent. What we call the jihadi are the violent Salafists.
[image]http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/front/art/blank.gif[/image]
So it's a sect within a group of religious believers within a larger religion?
Exactly. It's a problem that is going smaller and smaller, and the fanatics are not so many. I talked with several important muftis in Britain, for instance, and they told me that among the people coming into their mosques, the real fanatics, the violent Salafists, the jihadi people who actually participate in the jihad or pay for it are maybe 1 or 2 percent of the population of the Muslims going to the mosques.
And still this population of Muslims actually going to the mosques in Britain on Friday, the holy day, is maybe 30 percent of all the Muslim community. It should be about the same in France and in other European countries, but in Britain we have the proper figures because they did a poll, so to say. So you have 100 Muslims; then you have 30 of them going to the mosque, and among the 30 percent going to the mosque, the real fanatics are maybe 1 or 2 percent, not more.
But what is the real problem now is, what with the Iraqi situation and the occupied territory/Palestine situation, you've got a lot of people in the Muslim world that are indignant. They are mad at what is going [on]. And when you add these indignant or furious people, or humiliated people, to the 1 or 2 percent of fanatics, it makes a big crowd. This is the problem now.

There is, in a sense, an ideological sympathy in the population for people to take violent retribution?
Of course. If you go and when you go to the Arab Peninsula, all the countries -- Kuwait, Arabia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen -- everywhere you've got television screens with [Al] Arabiya or Al Jazeera. Day after day, hour after hour, you've got the tanks going in the cities in the Occupied Territories. You've got tanks and bombs flying over Fallujah, mothers crying, children crying. And this is going on for years now.
So a lot of young people -- don't forget that maybe half of the Saudi population is less than 25 years old -- when you're young and you see that, you revolt; you want to do something. And part of these people joined the jihadi who, without these screens and images all day long, would be maybe less than 5 percent of the population, even in the Arabian Peninsula.

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One should understand what really is jihad for a Muslim, for any Muslim in the world. It's a totally personal thing. Nobody -- and read what bin Laden says. He never gives orders. [He's] not a general; it's not an army. He says, "The good Muslim should understand that one should fight the infidels," and so on. "I am happy to see that some infidel has been hit in Casablanca," whatever. He never gives orders.
Jihad is a purely personal matter. You stop smoking; it's jihad. You start a diet; it's something that ... you force yourself to do. It's either a personal thing like refraining from smoking, as I said, or the greater jihad is fighting the infidels. But it's something personal.
Nobody in the world, even if he were to resuscitate the prophet himself, could order a Muslim to fight a jihad. So you, after looking too much at Arabiya or Al Jazeera TV, you feel mad about what the Crusader or the Jews are doing to the Muslims, so you decide to join a jihadi group.
But it's personal. The day you want to get out of the game, nobody can force you to stay. And if a small cell is built up, created, and they decide that bin Laden is the right thing to do, then the mufti of this small group, the religious leader, two weeks later says, "No, no, he's not good; he's an apostate, and we should go to another leader," they can go there, and nobody can force them to stay. It's very volatile. ...

But you obviously feel that the strength of this movement has increased since 9/11.
Let's be perfectly clear: What is happening now on the West Bank and more than that, even in Iraq, has created more jihadi than the ones that are being killed day after day in Iraq or on the left. Maybe you have now five times as many. It's a guess, of course. We don't have the roll calls of the jihad movement; such a thing doesn't exist. But we have many more jihadis than in 2001, of course. ...

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ORIGINAL: LadyEllen

Surely this is simple? There are some radical Muslims out there, so angry with us that they want to take bloody vengeance on us. However we dont know exactly who they are, which makes it difficult to combat them. So, if we simply pursue policies which eventually will piss off every Muslim to the point that they all take up arms, it becomes much more simple to identify the enemy, because its all of them.

In the meantime we have the advantage of exerting greater control over our own populations through passing anti-terrorism laws that are applied to all and massively inconvenient security regulations that affect everyone, and which will turn the non Muslim population against any Muslims living amongst them, thus providing widespread approval for an eventual war on Islam as a whole, and ready recruitment of thousands of young people to the army.

And best of all, since such a war would be unwinnable (viz Russia 0 Afghanistan 1, and Iraq 3  Rest of the World 1), it becomes an eternal state of affairs, justifying all manner of repressions and curtailments of that oh so inconvenient freedom that our nations seem to have misguidedly put at their cores. Throw in the terrible dictatorship that would prevail if Islam were to win the war, and the terrible (but of course benign) dictatorship we would have already, would seem perfectly reasonable in a time of war.

Orwell had it right, apart from the date.
E