The dominating influence on human affairs in the twenty-first century will be the future availability of oil.

Modern life depends on oil for food, shelter, clothing, and everything else. We use oil to grow and transport food. Oil powers machines which extract our building materials from nature. Oil and its variants are used for heat. Natural fibers are processed by oil driven equipment. Synthetic fibers are made from oil and natural gas directly. The industrial revolution launched the human animals' climb up overshoot hill. A clime facilitated by modern medicine made possible with oil.

It began with coal. But coal was dirty. Seeing the U.S.A. in a coal burning Chevrolet would be hard to do.

Video replaced the radio star long after oil replaced coal. Long after oil became critical to everything humans do.

Despite critical dependence. Which effectively constitutes an addiction. The world is generally unaware of impending oil depletion. How much oil is there, and how did this ignorance about it come about?

Oil is elusive. Some people are unaware of where oil comes from. Some are too aware. The too aware live in pollution where lives are short. Being able to name a source country is not awareness. Especially if you do no know where it is on a map. Just naming a country is trivia which masks ignorance. How much oil is there? How much oil was there. Most people have no clue. Knowing the United States uses about 20 million barrels of oil per day is new information. How much oil does Saudi Arabia have. How much oil there if you add up all the countries together.

To do that. Adding up all sources of oil. Things get complicated. Conventional oil production differs from light-tight oil that is extracted from fracked rock. Tar Sand and Orinoco Oils both have differences that complicate the estimate. Public oil reserve data by country, as reported by the EIA, OPEC, BP Statistical Review, Oil and Gas Journal, and other public journals are unreliable.

What is to be done? Data does exist, oil companies need the data, and they pay for it. Private data sources are more reliable than public sources. You get what you pay for.

Oil consultancies such as IHS Energy, Wood Mackenzie, Rystad Energy, and Globalshift Ltd. provide expensive restricted data. Some private data sources also overstate true global oil reserves by some 400 Gb. Separate the wheat from the chaff.

Add up the reasonable estimates for Ultimately Recoverable Resource (URR) estimates.

How much time before .

Hubbert linearization gives an answer. The resource-limited production peak of global ‘all-liquids’ will be around 2040, warfare being a fudge factor making an exact year impossible to pin down. So sixteen years give or take. Will the world be ready?

When global oil production is falling every year fun times shall not be had. Not in an unprepared nation.

Unless rapid and significant reductions in global oil demand is achieved by humane political measures. Resource-limited oil supply constraints will have significant economic and political consequences. The world will go to shit and there will be no leaders. Sustainability, however you define it will not be possible.

Carbon Fee and Dividend must be implemented now.

Carbon Fee and Dividend is not a tax. Taxes are collected by government for government use. A fee collected and paid to all people equally is a payment from the social commons not a tax.

It is important to understand this, or you will dismiss the benefits. Consider oil, money is taken at the wellhead where oil is mined. This is before the oil is sold.

When a dollar worth of oil is pulled from the ground, a percentage of value is taken. A fee that is added to the first sale.

A percentage determined by a citizens assembly. Added cost from the fee passes on as markup along the distribution chain. Having the fee at the source and nowhere else prevents an elite group from taking more than a fair share.

All money collected is equally divided among all citizens over the age of 16. Everybody gets a dividend.

The specific details of Fee and Dividend I have described allow all citizens the ability to cancel the fee added at the wellhead. If they use an average amount of fossil fuel. If you use less fossil fuel than average, Fee and Dividend pays you money. If you use more oil products you pay more because of the added fee.

Kids get a percentage starting at 16. Younger children don't use gasoline or diesel, and the collected money, ALL of it, must go to citizens who use oil products. Younger kids are excluded because they do not buy anything. The money is paid out to consumers to offset the added price consumers must pay from Fee and Dividend.

Having a citizens assembly set the fee is appropriate. It should not be done by government. Government provides the infrastructure for Fee and Dividend. But the commons must decide to do with the commons. Not an elite group. Those days must pass.

If you do not think money influences human behavior, ignore me and move on.