The funniest thing to come out of the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh is the vow to phase out subsidies for the production and consumption of fossil fuels.

As the WSJ notes in "G-20 Falls Short on Fossil-Fuel Agreement," the summit's communique doesn't even set a deadline for the phase-out, except to say the government supports should vanish "over the medium term," a period that could mean sometime in the next 10,000 years.

But that's not what makes the G-20's vowed "phase-out" so ridiculous. For one thing, oil companies are trumpeting a plethora of new discoveries, and oil companies will fight like hell to keep their subsidies to help pay the cost of extracting that difficult-to-reach oil.

Despite the cheerleading story the other day in the New York Times that announced these new discoveries and declared that there really is no "peak oil" crisis, industry figures themselves reveal that in some ways oil companies are going nowhere fast.

As the Oil & Gas Journal noted yesterday:

Oilmen are always crying about how they need oil prices to stay high so they can finance exploration and production. No sympathy from me — and I grew up in an influential oil town. The O&G Journal also notes: "High oil prices during most of 2008 helped industry to generate record cash flow of $590 billion, up 36% from 2007. ... The industry's cash flow exceeded capital spending by $100 billion."

That record cash flow, propped up by tax breaks and other subsidies, may not have generated record production, but it did generate record profits and big paydays for oil company execs.