[bryanlarsen]

Alberta tar sands have hundreds of years worth of reserves. They're also expensive and incredibly dirty to extract and emit significantly more CO2 during processing than a light oil well will. (The tar is usually melted by heating with natural gas).

I'm quite confident cheap renewable alternatives will make the tar sands inviable far before they run out.

[munk-a]

Some good news though, with the war in Iran the spiking oil price means that Albertan executives can ramp up operations and stay quite profitable! Push the price to 200/barrel and we'll just strip mine the entire province after airlifting out Calgary and Edmonton.

[mullingitover]

This assumes that there isn't profound demand destruction caused by the stratospheric energy prices.

Fossil fuels were already an inferior energy source when oil was $60/barrel. Electrification has been moving fast and accelerating, even at the pre-energy crisis prices.

Now? Current events are likely to take fossil fuels out back and give 'em the Old Yeller treatment with surprising speed.

[munk-a]

I absolutely agree, _in market driven economies_, fossil fuels are slowly pricing themselves out of relevancy. The issue is that for some reason the US specifically subsidizes their usage keeping them artificially lowly priced.

So, how many billions of newly printed debt is Trump willing to throw at the problem to keep those subsidies up so that he can be sheltered from the scary windmills?