[TexasCowboy]

It's interesting to me that as many threads as we have seen on FR about this subject, everyone still cannot think past, "How am I going to propel my car down the highway?"
It needs to be understood that IF we ever run out of oil, our world, as we know it, shuts down!

We are NOT going to run out of oil.
What we are going to run out of in America is oil that is easily obtained from areas which are environmentally approved for drilling.

[SunkenCiv]

Hey, take it easy, Cowboy. :') Everything we eat, wear, write on, etc, is made possible by liquid-fueled transportation. The field gets plowed, planted, treated, and harvested using diesel or gasoline. The crop gets to where it's going using those fuels. Same goes for processing the crops, transporting them to market, and getting the consumers to the markets and back home. Agriculture is the foundation stone of all civilization and other settled living, and hydrocarbons are the foundation stone of US agriculture. 400 years ago the 13 colonies were essentially 99+ per cent agrarian. We are now maybe 2 per cent agrarian.

[Nataku X]

Oh, we will run out of oil and probably soon enough, but never underestimate the power of the free market. Someone will invent an alternative pretty dang quick when the demand is high enough. Right now, even at $2.05, oil is cheap as dirt especially when viewed as a percentage of our income historically, so there's no real demand for an alternative.

Throwing tens of billions of federal dollars into finding an alternative won't speed up the process at all, either.