Understand your replies.
But the fact is that these are still FINITE energy supplies.
The history of the industrial world has been to find it, use it -- in ever-increasing quantities -- then HOPE you can find MORE of it!
It's a bit like building highways: The statistic is that for every NEW LANE OF HIGHWAY constructed, A FULL LANE AND ONE THIRD OF ADDITIONAL VEHICLES ARE PRODUCED TO ATTEMPT TO USE IT.
We could pave the ENTIRE PLANET and STILL be 30% behind.
Now think about that for a minute. Where are the people going to live that drive on the freeways? In their cars?
The statistic only demonstrates that freeways aren't being built as fast as they're needed. Freeways don't breed more people to drive on them.
There are a finite number of people that could possibly drive the cars to fill your freeways, and at some point there are enough lanes to handle them.
This is one of the stupid arguments sold by people who want to build trains and lock people into high density cities because of political agendas. It makes no sense.
You are using government planning to illustrate what you think are problems with freemarket capitalism.
The history of freemarket capitalism is that of the use of a resource until something else can accomplish the job cheaplier(my favorite illegitimate word)then that new approach displaces the old now depleted or too expensive (same thing)resource. A society with freemarket capitalism does not simply use up resources then crash into the wall. It is continually refining uses and developing new ones. That is how competing entrepreneurs survive. It surprises me how many conservatives do not understand this basic concept, this engine that has powered America to the top of the World in 200 years.
Let me restate that twisted fact properly:
The statistic is that A FULL LANE AND ONE THIRD OF ADDITIONAL VEHICLES ARE PRODUCED BY PRIVATE INDUSTRY before the GOVERNMENT GETS OFF THEIR LAZY ASSES AND PRODUCE ONE NEW LANE OF HIGHWAY.
IT'S GOING TO TAKE PRIVATE INDUSTRY TO SOLVE THE HIGHWAY PROBLEM TOO! GOVERNMENT IS PART OF THE PROBLEM, NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION.
There, now I feel better.
I've seen and heard that nonsensical pap thrown around before, and never had the chance to correct it.
Thanks for the opportunity.
In the case of energy, it simply is not scarce. One, the term itself is a misnomer, as it is entropy relations governed by flow of energy per unit time (power) across an entropy differential, that does work. Energy sensu stricto is absolutely conserved, as a law of nature. It is only shunted around and rearranged differently, never created or destroyed.
Even of power sources supplying continual energy flows across an entropy gradient, there is no scarcity. The sun pours 200 times as much onto the earth continually, as all life (let alone just us) has ever used. And there is more nuclear power in the earth's crust than mankind could use in thousands of years, even with energy consumption rising continually the entire time. The absolute order to live off of exists in matter itself, which "wants" to change into low energy photons spreading in all directions.
All fossile fuels are simply old bio fuels, and all bio fuels are simply organic solar power. No one has ever even demonstrated that more fossile fuel is currently being used than is currently being made, since the making process is so diffuse. But even if we are using it a thousand times or a million times faster than it forms, it formed for hundreds of millions of years.
And since only capital scarcity limits our access to unlimited power from uranium and direct solar, it makes no sense to sacrifice capital, the actually scarce factor, to spare fossile fuel sitting in the ground helping nobody. The sensible use to make of it is to get energy from the capital-cheap sources while capital is relatively scarce - which is the present - and those sources are relatively abundant - which is the present. And then to shift to capital-expensive sources when capital is relatively abundant - which it will be in the future - and those sources are relatively scarce - which will be in the future.
The transition is occasioned by price. When the capital spent on nukes generates several times the power that same capital spent on fossile fuels does, people will use more nukes and less fossile fuel. And this point must happen at some point, as capital becomes more adundant and fossile sources become more scarce. The same is true, probably long, long after that, for uranium to solar transitions. Eventually it will get hard to find uranium ore at high grades - not because it isn't there, we know there is enough for thousands of years of vastly expanded use from overall radiation counts in the crust - but because it may become hard to get at, just as shale oil is harder to get at than light sweet crude.
There is no absolute scarcity of anything. There are just limits set by the present level of our technology and our available capital. Within those limits, the signal that tells us which makes the most efficient use of the things that are actually scarce, as opposed to "finite" in the abstract and subject to green handwaving arguments, is price. Refusal of this proposition is the sure sign of economic ignorance and desire for central planning amongst green luddites.