We are rapidly approaching, or have already passed, the point where finding remaining natural energy reserves will be increasingly difficult and costly to find, or prohibitively expensive to extract.
Throughout the past few centuries, world economic growth has been hugely dependant upon energy production and consumption, whether to power machines that extract natural resources, or factories that turn those resources into products. Fossil fuels provide energy for electricity, heating, transportation, communication, defense, and many other facets of our lives.
Great fortunes have been either made, or enabled, through acquisition, management, and sales of vast natural energy reserves. Many wars have been fought, millions of lives lost, even nations and governments have arisen and succumbed to diplomatic or military efforts tied to energy resources.
While early man, beginning several hundred thousand years ago, unlocked and mastered the energy of wood in open fires, it is only in our recent history that mankind developed the advanced technology required to harness the energy of water, wind, the sun, nuclear fusion, and fossil fuels with the efficiency necessary for large-scale production.
Over the course of the last few centuries we have relied heavily on relatively cheap oil and coal for much of our energy use. Prices of these commodities rise and fall with supply, commonly based upon availability of new discoveries, as well as projected demand, which is highly susceptible to speculation. In the last few decades, researchers have increasingly focused attention on dwindling levels of new finds (reserves) and production, of both coal and oil. If their numbers are correct, we may be seeing an era when discovery of new, cost efficient reserves, is coming to a close.
In 1956, a report by geophysicist Marion King Hubbert warned that American oil reserves would begin declining somewhere around 1965 to 1970. More recent and comprehensive studies have shown his numbers to be highly reliable. His projections of world oil reserves and production predicted that world oil reserves have already begun to wane, and that by 2050 world production of oil will fall to about 1/3 of the peak we saw in the year 2005.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
This source (http://www.peakoil.net/) describes future discovery and acquisition of oil thusly: "Meanwhile, the aggregate decline rate appears to be about 5 per cent per year. To maintain world production, we would need to bring a new Saudi Arabia equivalent to three billion barrels annually - into full production every three years. There exists on earth not one single promising field that remotely approaches those requirements..."
Another aspect of this question has to do with the efficiency (or difficulties) with which we extract oil after finding it. The more it costs to drill, pump, refine and deliver petroleum products, the less growth our economies will experience. Another report (http://tinyurl.com/...), noting increasing efforts to find ever dwindling supplies of raw oil, cites: "Oil in its heyday - the 1930 and 1940s - produced 100:1 net-energy, a hundred barrels out for one barrel of energy invested. Today, oil fields range from 20:1 to 10:1. The United States average is 11:1. We are now digging into the 3:1 net-energy tar sands."
As oil production tapers off, and demand from the expanding economies of Asia further deplete resources, the price of oil and gas will surely continue to rise. Adding to this reverse of falling oil prices from the beginning of the Great Recession of 2007-2008, burgeoning economic growth will surely drive prices to new heights.
Though Republicans will, in this election year, attempt to define any increases as a failure of Pres Obama's administration, the fact is that Mother Nature simply cannot replenish 500 million years accumulation of fossil fuels in only a few hundred years.
The resulting gap between supply and demand will undoubtedly cause prices to rise for the coming generations, beginning with our children.
Eventually, this gap must increase gas, diesel and heating oil costs, all of which have great influences on the national economy. Whether due to a decline in energy production, or an increase in extraction costs, significant restructure and shrinkage of the global economy due to substantially greater prices may affect future (our children's future) worldwide economic growth.
How is it that many conservative Republicans require "personal responsibility" for private citizens, while also demanding reduction of the deficit/debt by constriction of government spending, when they can't admit that their own gas-guzzling SUVs and massively air-conditioned homes are adding to both the depletion of our dwindling fossil fuel supplies, and contributing to the future loss of income generated by the energy branch ?
Most conservative Republicans claim we are saddling our children with debt they shouldn't have to pay. But the fact is, we are indeed laying at the feet of future generations a shortage that took Mother Nature 500 million years to amass. Adding to this debt the financial and ecological costs of climate change from the consumption of gluttonous quantities of fossil fuels, and we really should question why many conservative Republicans shy away from those discussions.