Oil
As Legless says, there's oil and then there's oil... It's relatively "sweet" crude that's required in order to be refined into petrol, so the oil tar sands in Canada would need significant refining to turn them into petrol or diesel.

Lets have a look at what we know shall we?

The USA reached "Peak Oil" - i.e. the rate at which demand exceeded domestic supply of oil - in 1971. The UK followed in 2004. The worldwide "Peak Oil" has been calculated to occur at any point between 1995 and 2015. At this point, the global demand for oil will exceed the ability of supply. And what happens with any commodity where demand exceeds supply? It goes up in value.

Now OPEC members have been seen to suddenly (and substantially) revise estimates of their reserves. In 1980, Abu Dhabi claimed to have reserves of 28bn barrels. In 1988 they claimed to have reserves of 91bn barrels. Likewise Saudi Arabia has gone from 163bn to 258bn barrels in reserve between 1980 and 1990.

Why? No substantial discoveries of new fields have taken place. Indeed, Dr. Ali Samsam Bakhtiari, a former senior executive of the National Iranian Oil Company, has stated unequivocally that OPEC's oil reserves (notably Iran's) are grossly overstated. In an interview to Bloomberg in July 2006, he stated that world oil production is now at its peak and predicted that it will fall 32% by 2020.

Oil itself needs some considerable refining before you can pour it in your tank. Tar sands need significantly more expensive refining than the stuff that pours out of the North Sea, which will push its production price up even further.

"So why not pump out more oil then?" I hear you ask.

Simple. Because it takes between 10-20 years to design and build a new oil refinery and production facility. Refineries are operating at peak, so even if you pumped more oil out of the ground, the bottleneck is at the refineries themselves.

In conclusion, we're in deep shit. Governments by and large - in Europe and the USA in particular - have been keen to sit back, rake in the "Green Taxes" and do sweet nothing to invest in renewable energy. Of the "Green Tax" revenue claimed by the British government in 2007, less than 5% will be spent on renewable investment. The rest goes elsewhere - no prizes for guessing where.

Unfortunately, most of the ministers who saw this coming are now senile, bedridden or dead. Or have been elected to the EU.

In short, the politicians have cocked it right up, in such an epic fashion that we'll be paying the price for decades yet. Don't trust the politicians either, none of them took climate change seriously until someone worked out how to make pots of money out of it.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Mon 4 Aug 2008, 11:42, Reply)