U.S. Oil Production Is 23 Years Ahead of Schedule

And do what with the money raised with those taxes? I don't trust the people in charge to do what's needed to be done. The only positive thing from taxing oil consumption, would be to make it so expensive that people seek alternatives. When US gas prices were near $5/gallon, people sold their gas guzzlers and switched to fuel efficient choices. Once gas went back down, cars were sold off and guzzlers became the choice again. If Americans paid the similar prices to EU prices, things would be a lot different.

The most important thing we can do to transition off of oil and fossil fuels is to maximize the intensity at which we utilize renewable resources which directly substitute for them.

We maximize the intensity at which urban land is utilized by phasing in a 100-1200% national or global land value tax over the next century on the appraised market price which all land is expected to sell for if cleared of improvements.

We can also promote the development of a national, inter-state, zero-emission, passenger & freight rapid-transit market several times faster than automobile highways by allowing private rail and hyper-loop operators to deduct qualified ticket sales from their land value tax liabilities.

The the surface of the earth has temperature X. We can measure measure X with some degree of precision.

Any theory of physics that makes a prediction about the earth's temperature can be checked against the measured value of X.

All widely accepted theories that predict a temperature near X rely on the role of greenhouse gases and CO2 in particular to yield that temperature. And they all agree, more or less, that every doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration will result in an equal additive increase in our equilibrium temperature (so equilibrium temp grows as the log of the CO2 content).

Granted, to make _very precise_ predictions, you need to add forcing factors and feedback mechanisms that are hard to measure and hard to model and that's where computer simulations run into trouble. But the theory is sound and widely accepted.

I got most of the above a few years ago from some version of this class: https://www.coursera.org/learn/global-warming

Also the instructor's book, and the IPCC report from a few years ago.

Due to a combination of technological ingenuity and externalities in the form of current and future environmental degradation, we've been able to so far avoid the point where oil cannot be profitably produced for a price that consumers can afford to pay.