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Aren't we running out of hydrocarbons?

• barry-cotter 6y ago
  No. At the most trivial level they grow on trees or anything else that grows using photosynthesis. On a more pragmatic level usable reserves is not a fixed description of the world, it depends on technology. Fracking gets oil out of the ground at economic prices from what would have been unusable trash twenty years ago. You see the same thing in many different kinds of mining. There are places where they’re making a profit extracting iron from old tailings now, i.e. the waste from mining iron a hundred years ago is now itself profitable to mine for iron.
  • sudhirj 6y ago
    As a thought experiment (don't try this at home) it's actually feasible to cut all the trees on earth down, burn them without releasing that CO2 into the air and use that energy to scrub the atmosphere. This is a horrible idea, of course, but the illustrates the point above. All organic life either creates (via photosynthesis) or consumes hydrocarbons, so we have a lot of it to burn – the trick is not to let the gases into the air, which is what we never should have done in the first place.