Quote:
Originally Posted by jmg
Quote:
Originally Posted by Red Bread
Just curious if you've seen any credible studies claiming natural gas and/or crude will be dried up within any period of time that matters to those currently alive?
I just finished Steve Coll's excellent book on Exxon and even the most pessimistic studies, including comical growth in demand from China and India, concede that anything under 100 years out is unlikely at best.
It's all well and good to look for alternatives, but so many manufactured goods are entirely dependent on petrochemicals that you're not going to mic drop your way out of our dependency on them, Musk or not.
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200 years, not 100. Both numbers are alarmingly close considering how many millions and millions of years it took for those fossil fuels to form naturally, and the blink of an eye we've been using them up.
And I wouldn't be naive to think that it would be a "mic drop". It's going to be a long process that we might not see in our lifetime. However, the rose colored glasses need to come off at some point.
Does it matter to those that are currently alive? It doesn't matter if the highest priority in the universe is me and no one else, alive, dead, or soon to be alive matters compared to MY interests and what I have to gain or lose. Fortunately for everyone else in the world, we all don't think that way, what a fucked up place this would be if we did. |
Oh come on, without aggressive or global laws, in my lifetime, we've got air conditioners that are massively more efficient, cars release a fraction of the total pollutants while being more efficient even on stupid ethanol fuel, jets are hugely more efficient, we don't even have a space program and we've filled massive landfills with recyclables that will probably never be able to be processed.
This shouldn't be all doom and gloom. Look at your available options, buy what you're comfortable with and enjoy it. I've got a house with all LED lights, smart thermostats and I pay a premium to subsidize my state's wind program. But I also take my cars to the track and occasionally drive in a manner that might offend the average Prius driver.
Hell, our next car was going to be a Model 3, but that's clearly not happening so an i3 or plug in hybrid of some sort are the current leaders. But even still, all the plastics in those cars, the fluids to make the brakes work and most of the energy to make the physical car are still going to come from petrochemicals.