Probably by the time we get through 30% of it the planet will be unfit to support life as we know it.

Yeah, but by that time there'll be so much carbon in the atmosphere that the pyre of our own civilisation will turn into an oil seam over geological time. The Second Carboniferous Era, they'll call us.

Our great-grandchildren (or maybe sooner than that!) will look back upon our generation with astonishment, to think that we took this incredibly valuable chemical and of all the goddam things we could think of to do with it, we burned it to make our cars go and ruined the planet in the process.

This is good point we hadn't had. However damaging a gasoline drought would be to the world's standard of living, it wouldn't be half as damaging as a petrochemical drought.

Peter