Examines shale oil and tar sand oil vis-à-vis the state policies that allow extraction to be profitable
"These new sources of oil all have very low energy returns on energy investment. It takes a lot of energy to get just a little more net usable energy at the end of the process. That means it's only profitable when it's heavily subsidized by taxpayers, extracted from stolen land at government expense. And even then, the total increase in net energy output doesn't equal the oil produced by all those legacy fields in places like Saudi Arabia and Texas that are near exhaustion."