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The era of cheap oil is long gone. I don't have the data to come up with a timeline, but it is clear where the trend is going. The supply is finite, and there are increasing demands coming from the emerging world that will add pressure to the supply situation. Nothing short of a number of nuclear bombs will halt this trend.
It seems that this fact is not obvious to a lot of people. We should have woken up back in the 70s when the first oil shocks hit. That was the wake up call. We didn't sustain the effort looking for alternative sources. People who were promoting the ideas of wind, Solar, geothermal and hydrogen were laughed at by the traditional energy sector and found far more investment options in Japan than in the US. Fision may make a come back, but there are obvious problems with it (even outside of the waste disposal issue), and fusion has not yet been made practical.
The path forward should be clear. We need to reduce demand for oil in the short term and invest like hell in the most promising energy alternatives. This needs to be elevated to the level of our war on terror.
This recent experience of >$3/gallon gas in the US is the start, not the end. While finding new oil sources will stave off the pain for a while, it is just a band aid on a sucking chest wound.
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04 R1100SA (Pacific Blue metalic)
99 R1100SA (black) -- Totalled
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