|
|
|
|
|
|
by ok_dad
896 days ago
|
|
|
National security or global security just means it’s necessary to maintain the status quo. If needed, in sure we could get off oil in a matter of a decade or less, but it’s just easier to use oil and not work so hard to get off of it. You don’t have to explain how we’re dependent on oil to me, anyways, dependencies being a national security threat is a failure of political leadership for decades and decades now. We should have been off oil in the 80s or 90s after the crisis in the 70s, but instead we just paid off powerful men in the Middle East with weapons and kicked the can. |
|
|
I would be less optimistic as 80% of the energy used is fossil fuel (source: https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...).
Everything that we wear (plastic) or eat (fertilizers, and farming, trucking) comes from fossil fuel. Oil is everywhere. It is going to take a while to withdraw from our addiction.
> We should have been off oil in the 80s or 90s after the crisis in the 70s...
Oil is a fr(e)aking miracle. It is virtually free (just drill), it is energy dense, easy to transport, it makes fertilizers which allowed to fed the planet with less fields, it makes plastic, etc.
The countries fortunate enough to have some in their underground, have a natural printing money machine.
But, it is a limited resource, and using it at the scale we have been doing in the past 100 years, is impacting the environment.
> but instead we just paid off powerful men in the Middle East with weapons and kicked the can.
I agree that we kept kicking the can. But fortunately (or unfortunately if we are not prepared) it will eventually come to an end. It takes million of years to produce oil, and we consume it faster and faster. There will a time, where we would not find the easy oil, and it would become more and more expensive to find. If we are not prepared, then chaos will follow (wars as the last countries that have access to oil will keep it for them, economies will collapse as worldwide trade will break, etc.)
Clearly the past 100 years have been golden thanks to oil. We need to build a future where oil would be less abundant and more expensive.