Reply #9: Relax, and don't worry about it too much.

[TheWraith]

The reality is never as bad as the fearmongers make it out to be. And make no mistake, the "peak oil" issue attracts as many fearmongers as anything else. Some people, for perverse reasons of their own, enjoy thinking that the end of the world is imminent.

There have been people insisting that the oil was about to run out ever since the early 1970s. It still hasn't happened, and it WON'T happen, because the reserves are considerably larger than paranoia would make them. That doesn't mean we shouldn't switch over to better energy sources, but it does mean that we shouldn't be anticipating the fall of civilization like it's going to happen next Tuesday. You might as well worry yourself sick over the gradual cooling of the Earth's mantle, or the fact that the planet is going to be incinerated when the Sun turns into a red giant in 5.5 billion years. Worrying about it rarely does anything about problems you CAN control, and absolutely nothing about ones you can't.