Global Warming and Oil Depletion

Global warming and oil depletion have a lot in common: Oil, in particular.  They also share common solutions, namely using less oil, and using renewable energy instead.

A significant point of debate centres around whether oil depletion will add to global warming woes as nations turn to coal, or whether our total fossil fuel resource will turn to scarcity before really extreme damage can be done to the global climate.

Another point of debate is concerned with what kinds of policies should be used to manage these problems.

No doubt some people will be surprised to hear that it could be possible to exhaust, or significantly deplete, our fossil fuels within decades, but that is indeed what some authoritative and credible people are saying [1].  Depletion in these terms means, in the first instance, an inability to keep up with soaring global energy demand.  So it may transpire that nature will enforce the restraint that governments have been unable to.  This would be of dubious comfort; however voluntary measures are already prudent on account of climate change.

To date the EU is having a difficult time with the emissions trading system, and the United States is considering one of its own.  In this type of system the total amount of CO2 emitted from point sources is capped and a limited amount of permits is traded on a market basis.  However, if oil depletion becomes the dominant economic factor it may be that the oil supply itself will need to be capped.

The reasoning behind this is laid out in The Oil Depletion Protocol [2], and it involves matters of social equity and the avoidance of conflict.  Basically, to mitigate against a market grab for an essential and diminishing resource, deprivation of which is very likely to cause conflict, nations should cooperate to limit production in line with depletion, and share the resource.  If that looks like a tall order, and sounds like a tall order, well you know the rest—but of course, it really is still the most logical thing to do.

How does this fit with a world heading for international emissions trading?  Well it's an interesting question.  There's no doubt the government officials involved are aware of the oil depletion concerns—the information has been floating around for years—so it's unlikely they'd commit us to a system without regard to the future of energy supply.

However, international protocols take many years to implement.  Even the Montreal Protocol to phase-out CFCs took a decade, from discovery to declaration, and that counts as a success.

So the question is, if oil depletion becomes an issue in the near future
and prices start to rise, will we find ourselves with a regulatory system
mismatched to the requirements of the time?