I do wonder why we're not switching from oil to natural gas a lot faster though. Short version: The market works. Slightly less short version: You would switc

I do wonder why we're not switching from oil to natural gas a lot faster though. Short version: The market works. Slightly less short version: You would switch to natural gas if natural gas achieved the same goals at oil at enough of a lower cost to make it worth the switching costs. Part of the cost of oil is based on people's projections of the price of oil in the future; if one expects oil to be much more dear in the future than it is now, one should either buy oil and consume it now or buy oil and sell it later. Buying oil today drives up the price of oiil. One plausible reason one could think that oil would be more expensive in the future is if one thinks demand will outstrip supply. If one believes the future will hold an acceptable substitute for oil, one will be less likely to believe that future demand will exceed supply, and as a result one will believe the future price for oil will decline relative to today. This causes one to sell oil, propagating the price fall in the oil-demand-has-fallen future into the oil-demand-has-not-fallen-yet today. Which, at the margin, slightly delays "the future." Or, to put it another way: the credible announcement that we're ten years away from totally solving fossil fuels would cause the present price of all of them to crater.