I take it you’re too young to remember when ‘peak oil’ was a prophecy of doom, about how we’d run out of oil and civilization would decline. Today with green tech it’s come to mean something else, about when we’re going to significantly wean ourselves off oil.
Well yes but think about all the oil CEOs who are making a killing during their life time. Why would they care what happens when it runs out, it’ll happen after they are long gone and 6ft deep
Yes but imagine the glorious wars that will be fought over that last drop.
Yes, but it is sourced very far away and gets refined into a different product for consumer use that is always available (except during a local crisis) so therefore it’s not something to worry about and is naturally occurring.
Short-sighted concerns.
Yes, this has been discussed extensively, since coal was the fuel of the day. Non-renewable fuel is by definition finite. It’s one of many issues with fossil fuels.
There’s the theory of “peak oil” that people were freaking out about for a while. Well production follows something like a bell-curve. The idea was that we’re so dependant on oil, when world oil production starts declining, human population will be forced to decline with it. However, technology like fracking/horizontal drilling has opened up new, previously unavailable reserves; and cheap renewables are easing demand. We won’t run out per-se, but the energy needed to extract more will continue to increase (barring more technological developments). Oil companies are now predicting a demand-driven peak in oil consumption.
Modern agriculture is still heavily dependant on fossil fuels (fertilizer, pesticides, machinery, transportation, refrigeration), so oil and gas prices almost directly determine food prices. We should probably do something about that. And the greenhouse gas thing too.
I think I’ve heard someone say that there are enough fossil fuel reserves to burn to make the planet uninhabitable for humans.
could have sworn oil consumption has only gone up
Yeah, it has, but the rate of increase has slowed.
It used to be more of a worry that we’d ‘run out’ of petroleum in the very near future, but they keep finding more. The price continues to go up though, and that will continue to happen if we keep using so much of it. We’re finally at the point where electric out performs a combustion engine. So even though we are still very dependent on oil, the path to an electric future has never been clearer. Denmark is at 90% renewables, but many places are still way behind like Cuba at 4%. Cuba having blackouts right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production
There’s a finite amount of it, but we won’t ever use it all up. Oil deposits differ in how easy (and therefore cheap) they are to extract. As the easy deposits run out, we switch to more difficult deposits, the price goes up, and eventually the price will be higher than it is for other energy sources despite there being plenty of hard-to-extract oil still left in the ground.
Almost, there’s just 2 corrections:
eventually the price will be higher than it is for other energy sources despite there being plenty of hard-to-extract oil still left in the ground.
When that happens the oil companies will lobby to get special treatment and be subsidized because they’re “too big to fail”, and everyone depends on oil.
The second correction is that that has already happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_subsidies
Who is we? There is a reason the other stuff gets called “renewable energy” and oil doesn’t.
Humans?
