It never ceases to amaze me how the least qualified to answer questions like these get to the top and the mental midget media ask them to answer the difficult questions. We are at or near peak oil. What Mr. Hofmeister fails to mention in his ramblings is that alternatives to conventional oil are EXPENSIVE and will only get more expensive as time goes on. Tar sands release A LOT of CO2 to the air during extraction and processing not to mention the extraction process has laid thousands of square Kms to waste in Alberta. He also fails to mention that new fields being found are meager compared to the finds of the 50s and 60s and that most of them will also be EXPENSIVE to get at. There is a lot of oil left in the ground - undoubtedly more than has been pumped out. But the remaining oil will get tougher and tougher to pump out of the ground, hence what Matt Simmons says, time and again, is that the ability to produce oil will drop as time goes by and therefore by definition we have or sill soon reach a peak in oil production.
Sometimes the pickle heads of CNBC just amaze me with their 7th grade grasp of the world...