> Not the "running out soon" that you claim. At the time, the mantra was that most of the oil would become so expensive that it wouldn't be economically feasib

> Not the "running out soon" that you claim. At the time, the mantra was that most of the oil would become so expensive that it wouldn't be economically feasible to extract it. There would be oil in the ground, but in every practical sense we would be "out" since we wouldn't be able to use it. "We have very good ways now of estimating how much oil remains undiscovered. Now every so often someone reminds me that a hundred years ago someone did a calculation and predicted that we'd be out of oil in twenty five years. We obviously are not, the calculation must have been wrong therefore, of course, all calculations are wrong. [...] we're not asking today how long will the discovered oil last, we're talking about all the oil". Mr. Bartlett's predictions and analysis are horrendous and far from "very good". From the second video you linked to, here are his predictions concerning US Oil Production, during which he derides others who were predicting a rise in Oil Production. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0ghHia-M54&t=2420s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0ghHia-M54&t=2420s Now, let's see what actually happened (i.e. production roughly doubled): https://www.macrotrends.net/2562/us-crude-oil-production-historical-chart https://www.macrotrends.net/2562/us-crude-oil-production-his... > The biggest oil field finds in decades each add only a few months of US usage to the known reserves. “…just to stay even we need the production of a new Texas every year, an Alaskan North Slope every nine months, or a new Saudi Arabia every three years. Obviously, this cannot continue.” -- Jimmy Carter 1977 If we were to take Carter's warnings to heart back then and make policy decisions, it would have been a multi-trillion dollar mistake and people would have been much worse off. Obviously, there are limits to all things. My point is that calling the timing on these things is impossible and is almost always catastrophically wrong like Bartlett's predictions). Neils Bohr famously quipped, "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." This is so true, and especially so when you move the horizon out decades while trying to predict complicated and chaotic systems.