The Duke: "Thank you for your sanity check.
I'm always suspicious when folks say we have an infinite supply of anything that comes from a finite source - in this case Planet Earth."
Note the comments in #48 and others below it -- oil doesn't suddenly disappear, it simply becomes more difficult and expensive to extract, meaning higher prices for oil products and more efforts to develop alternatives.
For example, today electric vehicles don't make much sense for most people, but they definitely will if/when gasoline hits $10 per gallon at today's prices.
Alternatives for oil in transportation include:
Point is: oil can never run out because rising prices and restricted supplies will make substitute technologies more and more viable.
For example, today electric vehicles don’t make much sense for most people, but they definitely will if/when gasoline hits $10 per gallon at today’s prices.
...
Point is: oil can never run out because rising prices and restricted supplies will make substitute technologies more and more viable.
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And one more time — oil doesn’t have to run out. It need only run short. Geologically short. Money is a substance created whimsically by central banks. It has no impact on geology.
And the really ugly part is that the price of oil can be decreed. If the price of oil is so high that it is destroying society, you pass a law that defines the price of oil to be a number arbitrarily defined. And no, this does not mean oil providers cross their arms across their chests and refuse to provide it. They will do as they are ordered to do by men in uniform with guns. Money doesn’t define anything when society is disintegrating — because money is created by whimsy at central banks like the Fed.
As for electricity, it doesn’t move food on a diesel powered truck from farms to city grocery stores.
Scarcity is the destroyer of all societies. You have problems fueling food transport? The very first thing that occurs is all non food items cease transport because that space is required for food. That means no spare parts for you nuclear reactors or nat gas power generators or anything else. It also means no drug transport.
This is what scarcity does. It does not care about money.
I guess you're assuming that fossil fuels are not being used to generate the electricity that is inefficiently transferred to EVs as they are being charged(?)