At which point the fascist governments people have voted into power will keep on going as they were while murdering some convenient scapegoats, until mass scale industrialised human society collapses, never to recover because we used up all our resources.
Edit: I honestly think people don’t quite understand that once all this bullshit collapses, there will probably never be another high tech civilisation on Earth again: all the easily extractable resources will have been used up, and the amount of energy required to extract more would be higher than what will be available once oil-based hydrocarbons have been more or less used up. Magic batteries that require a ton of resources won’t fix the situation, and we have no large scale replacement for oil.
The large scale replacement for oil is the original source of that energy, the sun. Sure it will take a while, but high technology (read small computers) doesn’t actually require hydrocarbons, it just requires knowledge of physics. Modern society is based on hydrocarbon fuels because they’re so convenient, but that doesn’t mean it’s required for any of our technology to function. We will likely be combusting hydrocarbons for the rest of our existence, they’re just too convenient for energy storage, but the source of those hydrocarbons could easily be specialized cyanobacteria farms or direct chemical synthesis. Both of those technologies already exist, but we have never done any significant investment in them because they would have to compete with basically picking up what’s already lying around. In the absence of significant oil deposits we will be forced to make those technologies work.
All that still requires other resources though, and I’m not convinced that something like direct synthesis would be viable considering the energy use – renewables don’t generate energy from thin air, but the systems usually require eg. rare earth materials (which need to be mined, which currently takes oil, and then the systems need to be produced which requires more energy)
You may not know this but oil comes from cyanobacteria or algae blooming, dieing, and falling to the bottom of ancient lakes. We can farm them better than they could ever grow on their own in nature, just like we do with corn, rice, wheat, and a hundred other crops. The only complex part would be the scale required. We have the technology to industrialize hydrocarbon production that way today. Life isn’t magic, so there’s no reason we couldn’t do direct synthesis with more controlled processes. And yeah it’s going to require resources. Everything does. It’s just pretty fatalistic to think we won’t be able to bootstrap ourselves up to current technologies without oil when we’ve already done it once before. Oil just makes scale possible, not the technology itself.
At which point the fascist governments people have voted into power will keep on going as they were while murdering some convenient scapegoats, until mass scale industrialised human society collapses, never to recover because we used up all our resources.
Edit: I honestly think people don’t quite understand that once all this bullshit collapses, there will probably never be another high tech civilisation on Earth again: all the easily extractable resources will have been used up, and the amount of energy required to extract more would be higher than what will be available once oil-based hydrocarbons have been more or less used up. Magic batteries that require a ton of resources won’t fix the situation, and we have no large scale replacement for oil.
The large scale replacement for oil is the original source of that energy, the sun. Sure it will take a while, but high technology (read small computers) doesn’t actually require hydrocarbons, it just requires knowledge of physics. Modern society is based on hydrocarbon fuels because they’re so convenient, but that doesn’t mean it’s required for any of our technology to function. We will likely be combusting hydrocarbons for the rest of our existence, they’re just too convenient for energy storage, but the source of those hydrocarbons could easily be specialized cyanobacteria farms or direct chemical synthesis. Both of those technologies already exist, but we have never done any significant investment in them because they would have to compete with basically picking up what’s already lying around. In the absence of significant oil deposits we will be forced to make those technologies work.
All that still requires other resources though, and I’m not convinced that something like direct synthesis would be viable considering the energy use – renewables don’t generate energy from thin air, but the systems usually require eg. rare earth materials (which need to be mined, which currently takes oil, and then the systems need to be produced which requires more energy)
You may not know this but oil comes from cyanobacteria or algae blooming, dieing, and falling to the bottom of ancient lakes. We can farm them better than they could ever grow on their own in nature, just like we do with corn, rice, wheat, and a hundred other crops. The only complex part would be the scale required. We have the technology to industrialize hydrocarbon production that way today. Life isn’t magic, so there’s no reason we couldn’t do direct synthesis with more controlled processes. And yeah it’s going to require resources. Everything does. It’s just pretty fatalistic to think we won’t be able to bootstrap ourselves up to current technologies without oil when we’ve already done it once before. Oil just makes scale possible, not the technology itself.