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"At some point, certain sources of oil will become economically viable which aren't now."

Indeed. Higher prices are what lead directly to the fracking boom. Now some of those wells are being shut because prices have declined.

"Heck, it's an insane, absurd speculation, but maybe at some point energy will become so expensive we'll even come to our senses, stop listening to Greenpeace, and build nuclear plants to use that 10,000 years of uranium."

Your mouth to God's ear, my friend. There's actually enough for billions of years, if all sources and technologies are included. The late John McCarthy (probably better known here as the creator of Lisp) had a series of web pages about it.

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html

I keep pointing this out to a friend of mine. It's not like one day someone's going to say "oh, shit! we ran out! sorry, no more oil." It will just get more and more expensive.

> It's not like one day someone's going to say "oh, shit! we ran out! sorry, no more oil."

That's not necessarily true. Well extraction curves decline exponentially with the highest amount extracted early in the well's life.

Well discovery follows a very steep increase followed by a very steep decrease. The new fraking boom gave the extraction curve a new "bump" so it looks more like two gaussians overlapping each other. But the deposits were already discovered for the most part, so the discovery curve has remained consistent. And the drop off of the discovery curve is also exponential.

Ok, what all that boils down to is if the extraction curve doesn't keep resetting the drop off goes from global glut to largely unavailable in 20-30 years.

So when it runs out, for all practical purposes, you could easily be talking to a 25 year old who clearly remembers when everyone had a gas car, yet all the gas stations are closed.

Which would definitely feel like an "Oh shit!" to anyone experiencing it.

edit

To clarify a bit, that's 20-30 years from peak to pit. So if society doesn't seriously talk about the problem for 10-15 years (totally believable, we were heading downward before fraking), then argues over the solution for a couple of presidencies for ~10 years (again totally believable...), then you only have maybe 5 or 10 years to adjust societies power sources.

And it takes 7-10 years to build a nuclear power plant. Oh. Shit.

I think you're straw manning the peak oil argument here. Only the most naive "doomers" who don't understand economics argue that.

You're assuming that the alternatives are actually physically able to meet demand. If that's the case, then great -- what you describe would occur. If not then the only alternative is demand destruction. We can handle some amount of demand destruction in the form of cutting wasteful consumption, but too much would very rapidly disintegrate into... well... actual destruction.

I think a lot of people oversell nuclear power. It's true that there's a lot of irrational FUD about it, but the real reason it hasn't taken over isn't that. Greenpeace protests coal but that doesn't stop anyone from using it. Radical greens are not really that powerful. The reason nuclear hasn't taken over is that it's an expensive, finicky, difficult to manage and scale technology -- at least in its present form -- and has several "unacceptable" failure modes in worst case scenarios. I also suspect that the fossil fuel lobby has worked behind the scenes to shut down research into better ways of doing nuclear, since better forms of nuclear power that did not have these massive downsides would be genuinely disruptive. Multi-trillion-dollar industries are far more powerful than hippies.

> Radical greens are not really that powerful.

But then why did Germany shut down all its nuclear power plants, plants which already existed and were running without major problems?

Radical greens are not powerful in the sense of having direct political power, but they are extremely powerful in that the radical green memeplex (nuclear is bad, GMOs are bad, pollution is getting worse, recycling is a moral obligation, humanity is generally a blight on the planet) is hardened conventional wisdom in most, if not all, Western nations.

Oil price rises aren't gradual because both demand and supply are inelastic in the short term. This tends to produce "shocks": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_of_oil#/media/File:Crude...

The 1970s oil shock did change the world dramatically. And local peak oil in Syria has been a contributory factor to the war: spike in prices led to riots, which were repressed, igniting the violence.