If you're like me, you've been reading about a renaissance in American fossil-fuel production. Not just that, but that the United States is on course to gain "energy independence" and even become a significant exporter of natural gas.

"The transformation ... could see the country become the world's top energy producer by 2020," Bloomberg recently reported. Drill, baby, drill, would seem to have succeeded.

Big talk is as old as the Oil Patch. Reality often disappoints. The gusher of cheerleading about our energy situation requires deep-drilled skepticism.

That won't be easy. Americans are natural optimists, especially when it comes to what we see as our unalienable right to drive inexpensively. The energy business is also highly complex. Some issues are easily twisted while others are open to ongoing disagreement.

A few things are indisputable. U.S. oil production is up and a natural-gas boom is upon us. We still use more oil than we can produce at home.

The world is past the era where large oil fields were easy to reach and consisted of light sweet crude, the cheapest to refine. With 6.8 billion people and rapidly industrializing nations such as China and India, demand is skyrocketing. Nations are lining up energy supplies, causing geopolitical tensions. (See story below about drilling in the Amazon jungle.)

The new frontier for fossil fuels depends on technology such as deep-water drilling, tar-sands production and horizontal fracturing (fracking) into shale formations. These are only made economical because a higher-cost energy future is here, now.

The "happy-motoring era," as urbanist Jim Kunstler calls it, is fading. While a reset may be postponed, we will eventually have to make it.

The natural-gas boom results from three things: higher oil prices, advances in fracking technology and a flood of capital into drilling ventures. While the world is facing new scarcities of cheap oil, it is awash in money seeking the next play. For a few years, that's been natural gas. Some $22 billion every quarter goes into maintaining domestic-gas supplies, according to ARC Financial Research.

It's hard not to see parallels with the other manias that have brought us grief, from dot-com to housing. And indeed, the natural-gas bubble is collapsing from a glut of production that has depressed prices and pushed many producers to the edge. More are depending on debt to keep drilling.

"With these existentially low prices, the amount of cash flow generated to keep the natural-gas business viable will continue to dry up," ARC wrote in a research report last month.

It seems perverse. Oil prices are high and gasoline is near record levels, but low prices are killing natural-gas producers. Such is the fickleness of the energy business.

But doesn't the United States have 100 years of natural gas? No matter the price fluctuations, that's got to be good news, especially if natural gas could be converted to run more vehicles.

Unfortunately, that meme is highly questionable. Slate's Chris Nelder tracked it back to an April 2011 report from the Potential Gas Committee with research from the Colorado School of Mines. But both are industry-supported and hardly impartial. The supposed game-changing story has been pushed by people with an interest in drawing investment and acquiring oil and gas properties.

The idea of a 100-year supply depends heavily on sources that may not be recoverable at any price — or may not actually exist. This is a problem that's also common to claims about oil reserves. Are they proven or speculative? And how many fossil-fuel energy inputs are required for the gas energy output? Does it pay off? (This is a problem for supposedly green technologies, too.)

In addition, shale gas has relatively fast so-called decline rates in production. The result: New wells must be repeatedly drilled just to keep output even. That century's worth of natural gas could actually last between 11 and 22 years.

Then we must contend with the environmental problems from fracking, especially contamination of drinking water. This is not hippie alarmism, but a real danger in many communities.

The dangerous part of these tales is that they fuel American magical thinking. Most of us want sustainability to mean that technology will somehow enable us to maintain and expand the old order of cars, sprawl and growth based on cheap oil.

Our leaders won't tell us the truth while we could still make an orderly transition to the future.

Reality means that while natural gas will be an important part of our energy future, it won't sustain the unsustainable. Conservation, transit, passenger rail, quality urbanism and green energy are important, too, but get little government support compared with fossil fuels and cars. The Amtrak Cascades route show there is a popular appetite for transportation alternatives.

These measures would make oil and gas reserves last longer, even if the quick bucks from today's energy plays are less.

Then the elephant in the Oil Patch: More fossil-fuel use means more greenhouse gases. Climate change is real, human caused and happening faster than anticipated.

It will bring costs that we can't drill out of, baby.

You may reach Jon Talton at jtalton@seattletimes.com. On Twitter @jontalton.