There's a post on the front page from Steve LeVine that talks about the "new conventional wisdom" regarding fossil fuels in America, and the difficulties this poses for developing cleaner, more efficient technology.
The "new conventional wisdom" is a farce, and I fail to see how it could be taken seriously. There is a major marketing campaign attempting to convince us that hydraulic fracturing will provide us with centuries of natural gas, and other articles point to recent American exports of refined petroleum products to convince us that our energy independence is just around the corner. In the real world, America is still the world's top importer of crude oil, and the only thing that will change that is a drop in American oil consumption. We started using less oil in 2006 as world supply stopped growing, and our imports dropped from a peak of more than 11 million barrels/day in 2006 to less than 9 million barrels a day in 2012, a drop of more than 10%. This can be seen via data provided by the EIA, and the drop is visible in a variety of charts, from imported oil to petroleum products used.
America's recent oil production "boom" won't come close to getting us to our previous oil production peak reached in the 1970s, and it won't make a dent in world oil demand. It is only possible due to high oil prices, and thus there is no way to use this new, expensive oil to bring down oil prices.
It's not necessarily the end of the world, but I find it absurd that there is some "new conventional wisdom" that adding a few million barrels of oil per day of production is somehow going to save us from resource scarcity. Even the most optimistic estimates of production are a drop in the bucket compared to our levels of consumption. The sooner we get our heads out of the sand, the better chance we have to deal with the problem head on, because $4/gallon gasoline isn't going anywhere but up unless the global economy crashes, and then we'll have bigger things to worry about.