I'm curious if you are just in the mood to be contrary or if you are simply trying to get me to elaborate on the subject.
Mostly I'm pissed about something completely unrelated elsewhere in my life, and you get the sharp end of the stick.
But the reality is that humans will adjust. Oil is/was the lowest hanging fruit for portable energy. We're no longer discovering the huge, huge oil fields because it's not needed and exploration is expensive and we've gotten most of the big ones. When it becomes profitable to do so, we'll be going after the smaller ones, and it'll be faster and cheaper to do so at that point than it will now due to better technology and models.
But ultimately we'll have to learn to live with less oil - and that's already happening. People are thinking about how much fuel will cost for a given trip, and making some decisions based on that alone.
As fuel prices increase, so too will food prices, and since food is already dirt cheap in the US, it'll simply get a little more expensive by degrees. People will choose cheaper foods - which will often mean lower quality, higher calorie processed foods, but their masic needs will still be met. Of course the US accounts for less than half a billion of the world population. Consider the rest of the world, and you'll find that oil is already
significantly more expensive for them, and yet they still do just as well as us.
Oil is an important resource, but honestly it's a bunch of BS that the world will end due to the always impending oil crisis. Yes, things are going to change. They will have to. We will spend more for electric cars with batteries and fuel cells processing hydrogen rather than using oil. More and more farms will be planting solar cells alongside soy beans and corn so they can power their equipment. Factories will be using chemicals processed from plants rather than oil.
Oil is a cheap source of energy and many products we use.
It's not the only source, nor are the alternatives so expensive that we will enter another dark age.
