this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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Regarding the problem of running out of oil, I look at it a bit like, "we are a plant (biological plant)".
The plant starts in a seed, which provides it with nutrients (energy) as some kind of starting bonus. It can use these nutrients to develop itself and live, but it will recognize that at some point it will run out of calories and die. So it has to do something about it. What it does, is to develop leaves. These leaves collect the sunlight and this way, the plant has a constant and continuous source of energy/calories. So it can keep on living.
Society has a very similar problem. We have oil, but it is limited. We can use it to develop, but eventually we're gonna run out of it. So we have to do something about it. Just like a plant, we develop solar panels to collect the sunlight, so we have a continuous income of energy. This way we can live waaay beyond the time of our starting bonus.
You can't replace petrochemicals with sunlight, let alone convert everything that runs on some form of oil product into eg. electric - not nearly enough rare earths in existence, and hydrogen is not the solution either for the majority for a variety of reasons (starting from ridiculously low energy density to being absolute ass to store)
A large part of oil can be replaced with electricity. Please point to examples where neither solar power or renewable biomass are sufficient.