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But it's never been about oil availability. Oil extraction is nowadays far more expensive than it was a decade ago, both in cost and in energy expenditure. Rene

But it's never been about oil availability. Oil extraction is nowadays far more expensive than it was a decade ago, both in cost and in energy expenditure. Renewables are becoming cost-effective not just because of technical advances, but because oil will continue to get more expensive. No amount of technical advances will defeat thermodynamics.

jerf 13y ago
If normal economic forces naturally and relatively smoothly bring on renewable energy resources online over time (including sufficiently-clean "nuclear" as renewable for this purpose), and if the economy can be run more-or-less entirely on renewable + nuclear resources, and if there are in fact things other than "oil we could drill in 1970" to fill in the gap, then the only significant remaining problem is the carbon dioxide generated in the meantime, and very little special panic or angst for energy resource limitation is called for. People have been panicking and angsting about this for quite a few decades now, so if this is the ultimate resolution, that is a change in viewpoint worth discussing. This would leave us energy (literally and figuratively) to focus on the many other problems in the world. (We might not want to blithely sail into the perfectly-well-known future of energy unprepared... but... there's a crapload of money to be made providing energy to people, one hardly need create subsidies to make the transition happen if that's how the economics are going to line up, when there's billions or even trillions to be made by being the ones to get it right.)