Almost daily Corner bashing: Planet Gore edition

If you don't much give a damn about global warming, then I suppose you can snark all you want about Ecuador's suggestion that they be bribed out of developing their oil fields. But this does raise an important concern about the not-too-distant future.

Pretend for a moment that, through a series of well planned policies enacted in every country around the world, the global oil and natural gas markets had dried up--not because energy demand had dropped, exactly, but because alternative energy had become somewhat cheaper and oil was heavily taxed, (or embargoed, or whatever) everywhere. Suddenly, in our pretend world, those two resources have become extremely cheap for those countries lucky enough to sit atop big reserves of the stuff, and, attendantly, those same countries can use that fuel to satisfy just about all of their energy needs until they run their reserves completely dry. The problem, of course, is that at the end of that free for all atmospheric carbon concentration would (in absence of everything else) rest just within the USCAP-accepted limits. Remember, this scenario doesn't take into account the spread of coal plants in China and other developing countries and it doesn't take into account the fact that many countries rely exclusively upon their oil markets for sustenance. Those countries will have to turn those resources into something if they don't want to find themselves in dire crisis.

Ultimately I think this state of affairs will prove to be one of the most significant challenges the world will face as it tries to keep greenhouse gas concentrations at "acceptable" levels. But it may, in fact, ultimately require that we provide incentives (bribes?) for oil-rich yet otherwise-poor countries to keep their oil and their natural gas buried underground.