As mentioned above. The bridge fuel can only be nuclear. The green failure to acknowledge this makes their entire policy position vacuous.

AU goes nuke; while the rest get off of it.[ brilliant]

Herbert if the US want energy security it only has to issue the drilling permits. They have a known 100 year supply of oil, & shale oil in the ground, but Obama, chasing the greenie vote, won't issue the licences to harvest.

They could also approve the pipeline from Canada to the gulf coast, so the oil they were importing was friendly oil, but again Obama's politics get in the way.

The fool is all ready starting to try to prevent the harvest of shale natural gas. Some of this is doubtless due to the large percentage of his campaign funds that come from the wind & solar power industries. No doubt much of this is transferred from the huge subsidies, [up to half a billion] he has given them from taxpayer funds.

The shale gas has totally destroyed investment in those ridiculous "renewables" that are so uneconomic, they require massive corruption of the market for real energy, along with the subsidies.

Don't get the impression from this that I am suggesting that the Obama administration is corrupt, I'm not, I'm shouting it.

What would you need a bridging fuel for. The people that say climate change is imaginary, just hold change up. Renewables are alive and well, its AU that is way behind.

I came to this article late and I am distressed to see that only a couple of the author's glaring flaws in logic have been picked up.

As he notes the energy market has been transformed in the past few years by changes in technology which permits previous untapped shale fields to be economic, yet complains that we "only" have a 100 years or so of gas reserves at present production. He then makes the classic mistake of assuming that production will increase (quite true) but reserves will stay the same (nope - try again). We now have vastly more reserves than we did even a few years ago, let alone 30 years ago.

Same thing for coal. We now seem to have more reserves of coal than we did 30 years ago - or it may be about the same - at presetn rates of production. But one of the reasons the 100 year figure keeps on popping up is that no one bothers to count much beyond that level. It takes time and money to prove up a coal reserve and if the coal companies aren'tgoing to get to it for decades, they don't bother.

As for the oil, sure recetn production has not been all that could be hoped, but the alternative story is that OPEC is under investing in oil production and exploration for political reasons - not that we are approaching any fundamental limit. The author should start reading up about unconventional reserves in Canada and the gigantic deep water discoveries off the coast of Brazil. He would find himself much better informed as a result.

There has been a significant amount of uninformed comment.
First don't confuse this problem with global warming.
This a very different and a much more serious problem.

John McRobert appears to be a believer in the magic pudding.
Many assume higher prices will magically produce more oil.
Well they didn't !
Why, because peak crude oil occurred in 2005/2006. It is now history.
We are stuck at 75 M barrels a day.

Re gas, it will help but it cannot stop energy depletion, it can give
a little more time but gas unfortunately depletes very quickly once
it peaks. Also it is at present very cheap and in the US companies
are having a hard time to be profitable. They seem to be OK here.

Re coal, 30 years ago they did not have what they believed they had.
The best grades of coal from most countries have been burnt.
They are now working on more expensive lower grades, which greater
quantities have to be mined to get the same energy.
World peak coal was expected about 2025, but it probably has moved
forward because China has increased its imports by a large amount.

What no one seems to realise is that price does not solve the problem.
When the energy costs of an economy exceed something like 4 to 6 %
of GDP, then that economy goes straight into recession.
See what happened as the price of oil & coal rose during 2007 peaking
in July 2008 at $147 a barrel.
Remember this, 11 of the last 12 recessions were proceeded by a peak
in the price of oil.

Thats why rising prices do not solve the problem, except that the
economy no longer needs that energy because most are out of work.

Geothermal needs more effort. There is an enormous amount of energy
down there, just waiting to be tapped.