International institutions such as the International Energy Agency (IEA) are moving away from predictions that the end is near for oil, natural gas and coal -- because the end is not near.
The IEA has for the past few years said that a switch to renewable energies like solar and wind power are going to replace oil and gas, but it's not happening -- and that, in itself, is turning out to be a huge problem for the United States.
"Demand for oil is not going away anytime soon," oil company King Operating's CEO Jay Young says, "people thought Tesla cars and solar panels were going to take over, but they're not going to take over and demand for oil is as high as ever."
The IEA has been accused of aligning its energy policies and predictions with ideology, specifically the climate change agenda adopted by the United Nations and other world organizations.
One problem: Big investors have been staying away from fossil fuels for years -- too many years, and now some of the oil and gas wells that we've depended on are starting to run out of oil -- and there's no investment money to find and drill new wells.
One big problem with that is that Americans are used to paying less than most of the rest of the world for gasoline and petroleum, but searching for oil in the future will raise the price of that oil once it's found.
It costs money to find the oil and gas in the first place, then when it's found it's likely harder to retrieve that oil discoveries of the past.
The most important thing to remember about oil and gas is that there is no other source of fuel that can produce so much energy, molecule for molecule. It's just physics.
Yet many people, including experts and climate change alarmists, said that oil and gas were going to fade away as sources of energy, to be replaced by renewable energy like wind and solar power -- except that wind and solar cannot replace fossil fuels.
The erroneous assumption that renewables would replace fossil fuels is leading the world, and especially the United States, into a potential catastrophe because we don't know where the new oil we need is going to come from, and wherever that turns out to be, it's certainly going to be more expensive than it's been in the past (maybe a lot more expensive, but that's another story for another time, experts say).
"Demand for oil, peak demand, more of a thirst for the stuff than ever, is going to go on for a long time," Young adds, so ramping up new oil exploration is a dire need for America.
Some institutions like the IEA have been living in "something like a dream" regarding renewables, which are adding electricity to the US power grid and helping keep the lights on across the nation (keeping in mind the fact that electricity makes up only 20-percent of energy demand in America) but renewables cannot replace oil and gas.
Beyond renewables, the rest of US energy use is transportation, industrial, chemical, and other liquids for which the only source is oil and natural gas.
Reminding us that despite what we're sometimes told, some things don't change.