Quote:
Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
People are forgetting that the supply of oil isn't an issue of internal combustion, it's an issue of overall energy. Internal combustion is just a way of accessing stored energy, which is energy that was pre-stored and in the ground waiting for us that we didn't need to harness ourselves. Talking about things like electric cars is completely beside the point. Most of our electricity comes from fossil fuels. Having oil is having access to millions of years of solar energy in the form of buried plant material. We have no other free energy inheritance to draw from. Other automobile technologies might be more efficient than internal combustion, but no where near enough to support high automobile usage without access to our cheap energy inheritance.
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Your argument is a valid one, but it's also rooted in the present. There is a lot of work being done to open up new ways of harnessing energy. Again, a huge topic for another forum. Don't discount the likelyhood that future advancements in technology will continue to discover viable alternatives to what we have in the present.
But, let's be clear, if we are talking energy use, pollution, etc., everything we do has to be taken under scrutiny, the whole world over. How about developing countries that are now making the environmental mistakes we made 50 years ago? What about astronomical world population? Etc. etc. etc. Another huge topic that I will not pursue here.
That's all for me. I don't intend to water down this thread with any further discussion on this topic.