“We’re Running Out of Oil”: The Lie Used to Support the Green Energy Agenda
Claims that the we’re running out of oil have long been used to promote the green agenda, but estimates of the amount of recoverable oil on Earth have been revised upward repeatedly over the past seven decades.
In 1874, the state geologist of Pennsylvania, then the nation’s leading oil producer, warned that the U.S. had only four years of oil remaining. Forty years later, in 1914, when oil still hadn’t run out, the federal government said the U.S. had only a ten-year supply remaining. In 1940, the government announced that reserves would be depleted within a decade and a half.
An article published on August 3, 1966, reported that “a geologist stuck a figurative dipstick into the United States’ oil supplies Tuesday and estimated that the country may be dry in 10 years,” placing the projected date of U.S. exhaustion at 1976. The most widely cited doomsday prediction came in 1972, when the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report calculated that global petroleum reserves, growing at then-current consumption rates, would be exhausted within 20 years, implying oil would run out by 1992.
For the past several decades, the claim that oil will run out has been used to promote the green energy transition, framing the use of solar and wind power as necessary to preserve human life. However, the people and institutions promoting the “oil is running out” narrative are the same people and institutions advancing the climate crisis narrative. As with other forms of propaganda, new vocabulary had to be invented, including the term “peak oil.
Peak oil is the theory that global oil production rises to a maximum point and then declines irreversibly as a finite resource is depleted. Yale Environment 360 reported that Rystad Energy expects natural gas production to peak and decline as renewables take over, and that the International Energy Agency (IEA) in 2021 called on oil companies to immediately end oil prospecting and pull back on production as part of a net-zero pathway explicitly grounded in the “peak oil” framing.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/07/were-running-oil-lie-used-support-green-energy/
