LONDON/OSLO -- People like to discuss whether the world is running out of oil and gas, and the big oil companies round the world have now joined in with warnings about energy shortages and the need to retool our economies on a more energy-efficient basis. And to emphasize their dire warnings, they are currently predicting huge and immediate rises in the price of gas and oil in Europe.

But the whole debate between the pessimists -- yes we are drinking oil faster than we can find it -- vs. the optimists -- no, there is plenty more to be found and extracted -- is really irrelevant. Energy resources themselves are not the problem. The problem is the management of the world's vast energy resources, and all the complex political and economic decisions and choices and events that surround that management task.

Energy sources available to the human race are unlimited, however much we use. Nuclear energy is all about politics. But it can provide enough electricity to warm and light the whole planet forever, and even to colonize space as well. Fusion, now being explored, seeks in effect to encase in a bottle the entire energy equivalent of the sun. Even traditional energy resources, like coal and oil and gas, exist in quantities so vast that it would take centuries for the world to run out, if ever, despite the repeated claims if some scientists that we have "reached the peak," or are about to reach it.