[corylehey]

CO2 argument aside, just because oil makes such a large portion of energy doesn't mean we are dependent on it to that degree.

It's simply the most economic way to currently fill that energy need. If oil runs out, which may be way further into the future than anyone realizes, then it will no longer be the most economic option and thus replaced by the next in line.

Mass die off? bare subsistence? What kind of comic books are you reading that in?

[api]

I'm just going to say that you should research this a bit.

How much sunk cost do we have out there in fossil-fuel-based infrastructure and technology? How much would it cost in energy to replace all that sunk cost? Where's the investment capital going to come from for all that in a shrinking economy?

Many people thought we'd hit "peak oil" in the 2000s. They were wrong. That's the nature of bubbles -- they always go higher than anyone anticipates. The amount of oil we produce will continue to rise with demand on a kind of stair-step function until it doesn't. The people who predict the bubble popping always sound like fools until they don't. Then they sound like prophets, but then it's too late.

When will this point be? Next decade? Four decades from now? Nobody really knows. You're comfortable with that? Do you have kids?

Also keep in mind that we might be able to keep stretching it out very far if we adopt things like coal to liquids, gas to liquids, etc. But as we do that, the environmental damage will increase exponentially as will the CO2 emissions per unit energy generated. If you think we have a CO2 problem now...

I would think our recent experience with economic bubbles would provide some sense of how these things unfold. Bubbles make everyone look like a fool in turn. First they make the skeptics and "bears" look like fools, and then they pop and make the believers look like fools.

Fossil fuel extraction -- the self-catalyzed exponential utilization of a finite resource -- behaves quite a lot like an economic bubble and will ultimately end the same way because physics. The question is whether we will have moved on enough by then that the blow is cushioned. That's an existential question IMHO. If the answer is "no," there won't be much of a future.

[corylehey]

Completely comfortable with it. I'd rather have cheap oil subsidize as much technological advancement as possible while we figure out how to replace it with an equal or better solution. If we cant, we'll pay more and use less. I don't think my 7 year old is gonna be living in a mad max scenario.

[api]

You're assuming individual or social utility-maximizing rational behavior if we do hit limits and begin deflating. I don't share that faith.

Look at what happens domestically when we have a year or two of recession and take the exponent of that. Now imagine a contracting economy for decades with the rate of contraction accelerating over time.

The "genetically rational" (not hedonic or utility maximizing) selfish-gene course of action in a shrinking pie world is to reproduce as much as you can and then kill as many other people as possible, preferably those from lineages further from yours (other ethnicities). This increases the odds of your offspring successfully reproducing by eliminating their competition. Our genes are ancient, and they know what to do when the famine comes. They don't "care" whether it sucks from the perspective of their sentient but disposable constructs/vehicles. Evolution is amoral, and nature doesn't care about you.

An alternate "genetically rational" strategy is to retreat to the margins and wait for the episode of "Walking Dead" to end, but there'd be competition for good but isolated places to live off the land. In this scenario you'd want to actually look poor, if not be poor, since that would make you less attractive to raiders.

Not exactly a future I want to see. I'd rather just be at ground zero when a nuke hits. Quick and painless.

[300bps]

There is a BBC show called Bang Goes the Theory that is similar to mythbusters. There was a particular episode where they took a typical UK family and unbeknownst to them put them into a house that was solely powered by electricity generated by bicyclists. It is a stark lesson on how much we take easy energy from fossil fuels for granted:

http://www.electricpedals.com/human-power-station/

It is quite foolish and selfish that generations living from about 1900 to 2100 will burn up 3 billion years of stored sunlight in the form of fossil fuels.

It will be at the least drastically painful when the fossil fuels run out if we don't take action.

[api]

Another way of thinking about it:

You're in a startup, and you see that your "burn" gives you approximately six months of runway. Your revenue is increasing, but too slow. The lines do not intersect.

Doing nothing proactive about the fossil fuel problem is identical to doing nothing proactive in that scenario. "Burn" is quite literal in this analogy, and "revenue" is analogous to our ability to tap and utilize other sources of energy economically. Right now we're like a startup on a death march to bankruptcy. Barring benevolent aliens, I doubt there's any more venture capital available.

A lot of people have a cognitive block about this issue because historically it's an issue raised by "liberals" and "hippies." But it's not a political issue. It's a physics issue. It's as "hard" and objective an issue as it gets.

If humanity were to fail as a species and you asked me (in the afterlife?) why, I'd say "because we used ideas and facts as indicators of membership in social cliques, making it impossible to think objectively about things without threatening our standing in those groups."