To meet the energy challenge requires the most important energy of all - human creativity. That's the real prize.

To meet the energy challenge requires the most important energy of all - human creativity. That's the real prize.

Cycles of shortage and surplus characterize the entire history of oil.

We experienced similiar fears in the 1880s, at the end of World War I and II. And we ran out in the 1970s.

But the key thing is that Iraq, while it's got very large oil reserves, has marginalized itself as an oil exporter and these days its exports are only about one tenth that of neighboring Saudi Arabia.

Even Silicon Valley investors have put well over a $1 billion in new energy technologies.

So the major obstacle to the development of new supplies is not geology but what happens above ground: international affairs, politics, investment and technology.