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It's obviously a matter of when, not if It was just as obvious a hundred years ago that horse manure piling up in city streets was just going to keep getting w

It's obviously a matter of when, not if It was just as obvious a hundred years ago that horse manure piling up in city streets was just going to keep getting worse. we can all agree that it's a non-renewable resource which will not be around forever True but irrelevant. The oil supply is finite only in physical terms, not in economic terms. It is possible to extract an unbounded amount of value from a bounded resource. All you need is an increasing price, which happens automatically as supplies decrease, and which provides an incentive for substitution. I'd happily take a wager that humanity will transition off petroleum long before we "run out" of oil.

jfoutz 11y ago
In some sense, peak oil happened. All of the easily accessible, abundant oil has been used up. Now you need a higher level of technology to extract oil. Because that's more expensive to produce than the easy stuff, renewables are catching up. The stuff really is more challenging to produce, you need much more understanding and higher quality tools. Fortunately we're enjoying the compound interest of computers, software, material science and a million other fields that make difficult things simpler. I won't take your transition bet, but i would bet if we had to extract oil using only technology older than 2000, we'd be pretty screwed.