At first blush, there's no question that today's announcement that a vast pool of oil has been discovered deep below the Gulf of Mexico is good news. Shares of the companies involved – Chevron, Devon Energy and Statoil all moved up, and some undoubtedly used this story to show that predictions of the End of Oil have been greatly exaggerated.

When I read past the headline and into the fine print, however, things got a little less clear. Experts say the new discovery could boost U.S. oil reserves by a whopping 50%. Fantastic! Let's all go gas up our SUVs! Oh … wait … what's that next paragraph say?

"Chevron on Tuesday estimated the 300-square-mile region where its test well sits could hold between 3 billion and 15 billion barrels of oil and natural gas liquids. The U.S. consumes roughly 5.7 billion barrels of crude-oil in a year."

Huh? So this great oil discovery – "the biggest domestic oil discovery since Prudhoe Bay a generation ago" – contains somewhere between six months and three year's worth of oil? Am I reading that right?

And then there's this: "… the discovery carries particular importance for the industry at a time when Western oil and gas companies are finding fewer opportunities in politically unstable parts of the world."

Let's go over this again: We're "finding fewer opportunities" in unstable parts of the world, and the largest find in our neck of the woods will last a measly six months to three years?

So the bad news is that this story seems to support evidence that it's getting harder and harder to find enough new oil to satisfy the world's thirst. The good news is that, thanks to this find, we've bought ourselves a little more time to develop alternatives before finding new oil becomes prohibitively expensive. Alternatives, after all, make more and more sense the harder (i.e. more expensive) it gets to find oil.

Buying time, however, doesn't mean putting innovation off. Especially since this whole argument ignores one very large elephant in the room: Climate change. It's not just that oil's getting harder and harder to find, it's that we now understand just how much burning it is contributing to global warming.

In other words, nobody'd better use this news as an excuse to slow down the drive towards alternative energy sources like wind, solar and biofuels. Buying six months to three years in this race ain't much … but it seems to me we'd better take advantage of all the time we've got.