[dozzie]

Are you sure that we have no technology at all that would produce gasoline from heavier fractions of oil? I think we have, only they're not as cost efficient as simple distillation, which can rapidly change if lighter fractions become less available.

As far as I know, we neither exploit nor track the deposits of heavier oil.

[astrodust]

I think the point of the Mad Max plot was not that you couldn't extract oil from other sources, but that the damage had already been done to the economy and society so it was past the tipping point and already on to pure chaos.

By the way, we exploit oil sands which are about as heavy as you get. The stuff is basically asphalt.

[dozzie]

My point is that Mad Max assumed a very sudden and unrepairable damage that can't be worked around.

It's hard to believe that people would panic if the oil price went high, or even sky high. It wouldn't be pretty, sure, probably several industry sectors would die, but I don't see how it would end our world.

Most of the oil we use today is consumed by transportation, but there are plenty of other propulsion systems than just internal combustion engine (to name a few: electric ones, pneumatic, flywheel, external combustion (that can run on burning guano; e.g. Stirling engine)). Then there is the thing that we can still produce gasoline artificially from coal, it's just more expensive than how we get the gasoline currently.

I don't question the vision of collapsed society shown in Mad Max (I don't know if it makes senese or not, I just don't think about it). But how and why the society collapsed (MM1 version) doesn't stand the basic scrutiny.

[pmoriarty]

"It's hard to believe that people would panic if the oil price went high, or even sky high. It wouldn't be pretty, sure, probably several industry sectors would die, but I don't see how it would end our world."

You might be interested in watching "The End of Suburbia":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug

[yarrel]

All of our food is produced and distributed using oil.

Starvation would end our world pretty quickly.

[dozzie]

> All of our food is produced and distributed using oil.

Regarding distribution:

- we had working short-distance transportation with no oil whatsoever for ages literally, and for mechanical transport, there are alternatives to burning gasoline, it just won't be at the speed of 60mph

- long-distance transportation using rails is much more energy efficient than anything we use today, barring maybe moving by rivers, and rail infrastructure only sucks such heavily in the USA

Production, too, is not that reliant on oil. Most of the gain of modern agriculture is not due to mechanization, but due to fertilizers and pesticides. It's chemistry what brought us prosperity in this field, not mechanics.

[astrodust]

Every single thing you're describing here is catastrophic and world-ending.

The world without oil looks like North Korea. The world with oil looks like South Korea.

Without fertilizer there will be mass starvation, this is absolutely assured. It doesn't matter about production or transport. There won't be any food in the first place.

[dozzie]

> Every single thing you're describing here is catastrophic and world-ending.

I fail to see how replacing a Diesel engine that burns diesel oil inside its cylinders with a Stirling engine that burns dried guano in an external combustion chamber is world-ending.

Not to mention that old style diesel engines usually can run on cooking oil(!) or ethanol(!), so the migration to alternative propulsion wouldn't need to be that immediate. Transportation of goods critical to survival (e.g. food) could still be secured.

And we aren't discussing the world where fertilizers disappeared. We were talking about the world without gasoline.