US might have wider, longer straw by 2017

I was perturbed today by the trumpeting of news on The Oil Drum, Yahoo, and worse yet NPR that the US is projected to overtake Saudi Arabia in terms of oil production by 2017 (or 2020, as stated in the NPR article). The hypothesis of such a growth in production this large has been fairly critiqued one way or another (1, 2, 3, 4; sorry for lack of variety they are all Oil Drum Reports).

There are other problems though:

• There's a larger-than-most-intellects-think portion of this population that want to live on gasoline like they live on oxygen: cheaply, and dependably. To have any hope of a sustainable society going into the future, this inertia/momentum needs to be halted, and the idea of weening ourselves off limited fuels needs to become mainstream. This news may make me a little less antsy, but odds are that will be compensated with fears of new born momentum and inertia that may not be controllable later on.
• While I am not your stereotypical environmentalist, I do look at the environment as a tool for humans to use to live. Like all tools, you have to use and maintain Earth well, otherwise Earth gets rusty, and can get a little problematic (i.e. Sandy and numerous earthquakes that have occurred attributable to hydraulic fracturing). We need the environment for food, clean water, food for livestock, shelter material, clothing from livestock, etc. We break it, we lose most of everything we used to adapt to various environments, and die.

So, aside from the fact that, fossil fuels, no matter how many new sources we find and how fast we extract them over time, are limited, we have the human inertia factor, and of course the environmental one. This news today was like a trident blow to my mind.