Your questioning is about valid topics, or should I say topic - ethics. In this case ethics and a specific industry group. However, dealing with ethics in the corporate world is as difficult as with any other area of life, as there are seemingly endless streams of related issues that can be raised once you open Pandora's box.

What you are wanting to ask, as I understand it, is "How responsible are the API members in informing their customers of limited future availability of key products?" and the corollary "How will the industry deal with the effects of not meeting their customers needs?".

Please remember that the API is an industry interest group and solely exists for the benefit of its members, not to solve the world's problems. However, as part of this world they cannot escape their surroundings and at least from their published material it appears they are at least open to discussing these issues.

Given that this API conference call appears to be at least somewhat open to the ethical issues (or else why would they even want to discuss the environment in the first place?) neverthless it would probably be nonproductive to try and paint the API into a corner from the outset.

Hopefully someone (RR?) will be able to get the leaders of the API to acknowledge that issues of energy availability do indeed exist and will get worse in the coming decade, not as some undeterminable far future event.

And indeed the environmental impacts of decreased oil and gas are large as coal, and poor quality coal at that, will be used as substitutes wherever possible.