Really ? Where were the technological improvements when oil shot up to $150 in 2008 ? Sure technological improvements eventually got us to the energy level we

Really ? Where were the technological improvements when oil shot up to $150 in 2008 ? Sure technological improvements eventually got us to the energy level we were at in 2005 ... but only just barely and only for a week. Since then it's been going down, with predictable results. And while shale (currently) provides a few years delay, it's only for a few years, and maybe even only America. That's the problem with these ass-saving technologies. The first few times they saved our ass for several centuries (coal + trains, which will keep working, later nuclear). The next revolution saved our collective energy-hogging asses for ~60 years. The next one, horizontal drilling, did for ~10-15 years. Now we have shale oil, which saves our asses for 5-6 years tops. The situation is not as rosy as you indicate at all. We're effectively dependent on ALL technologies operating at totally maxed out capacity for economic prosperity, and a lot of these technologies are faltering all at the same time. It won't be pretty. Frankly we have ~5 years to increase the efficiency of batteries (which have improved a factor 2 in ~100 years in mass/energy and volume/energy). Not by a factor of 2, but a factor of 10, to keep our society at the same technological level. Nobody has any even theoretical ideas to get a twofold improvement. We only have 5 years because of shale oil, and we knew perfectly well in 2000 that we'd need this super-battery before the decade was out, and humanity simply failed ... I went to a robotic mechanics lecture 2 years ago. The opening line was this : you climbed 5 floors to get here, and you got seriously tired (the elevators were out). If you had been the best robot we have, with roughly half it's weight dedicated to battery you would have just used ~50% of the total energy contents of your battery. This is a problem that needs to be solved before we have any real hope of true independent robots. Oh and let's feel inspired by nature. Wait. How does nature solve this ? Well, here's the basic formula for oil CnH2n+2. Here's the basic formula for human fat : CnH2nOOH. In both cases the energy is stored in the same chemical structure. The energy is pretty much stored in the exact same chemical bonds in the human body (or any animal) and in a gas tank. In other words : in 4 billion years evolution did not find a better way. Do you think humanity is likely to improve upon it ? You best hope so. Or we'll see repeats of 2008, except without recovery.