Like I posted in the header.
Jump over the lib crap.
And it doesn’t matter if the earth produces it naturally (which I believe is very likely). That production will not keep up with the consumption rates.
Well, human consumption of whale oil didn’t keep up with production either, and that exactly proves my point. We don’t burn whale oil now, nor would we want to. But it bought us time to develop a better source: coal oil, which allowed us to transition to oil, which will allow us to transition to something better.
Having said that, it took over 50 years to transition from whale oil to coal oil, and roughly the same time to transition away from coal oil. In my youth, I remember that homes commonly had coal bins and outside doors for the truck to dump coal through. (Indeed, there are homes that still have the doors visible from the street, if you know what to look for.) Large commercial buildings had smokestacks. Now, that is all gone. Who wants the pollution even if it wasn’t illegal?
Now me? I heat with wood. We have come full circle because I recently calculated that a pound of oak replaces 9 cents worth of propane which is commonly burned in rural areas. I burn a wheelbarrow of wood a day, or maybe 30 pounds = ~$3 of propane. That is roughly $100/month, but my house is pretty efficient. A nearby elderly in-law has spent almost $800 to heat a very modest house with propane.
While the wood is free, my time has opportunity costs. I figure that cutting and hauling logs of standing dead timber and then splitting them and stacking pays me more than the minimum wage in replacing propane I would otherwise burn.
Tellingly, I don’t see anyone trying to clean up and burn all the standing dead trees that are visible from the highway as was done for a few years following the first oil price shock in the 1970’s. Even with “high” prices today, they are not so high that people are willing to do the manual labor to gather otherwise free heat.
So, there is more to a person’s energy price calculation than just straight dollars per BTU. We include our own value to the environmental burden of our fuel choices, and subjective factors such as how much work we are willing to do to compensate for convenience. Our incredible prosperity gives us the resources to be able to make these choices.
I know people who, in their youth, had no choice. They either burned wood that they had to cut and haul or they froze. Or else they burned coal. This is what their neighbors did and everyone in the community. There was no “electric” heat, nor natural gas.
But consider that for the present it appears the reason we are denied the choice of diesel autos is because of the attitude by just a few states to approve those engines in autos. We also have few states that would entertain construction of any new refineries. We have a federal EPA that has Balkanized the gasoline supply by defining almost two dozen specific blends by region that cannot be cross sold, under penalty of felony jail time. And government refuses to allow drilling for oil and gas on much of our own soil. So, at least some of our ability to choose the best fuels or fuel sources has been taken from us by government. We are left to make do with what is left.