We will see. There have been predictions about peak oil before but then new technologies unlocked previously inaccessible deposits. So i don’t have a really good feel for how long exactly they can keep kicking this particular can down the road. It may be longer than we think.
The real impetus for change is going to have to also be political, not just purely economic. Driven by the increasingly undeniable reality of climate change rather than price inflation, since prices can be manipulated in a lot of ways by governments and by cartels like OPEC.
Of course it also helps that renewable technologies are rapidly becoming more economically appealing while fossil fuels are getting more expensive, but i think that leaning too much into the notion that change has to be driven by economic considerations is not such a great idea.
Because that leaves the door open to the possibility that if somehow the problems of prices and scarcity weren’t there then we wouldn’t need to ditch fossil fuels. But even if fossil fuels were endless and free, we would still need to transition away from them asap.
Well that’s the thing. New technologies unlocked new deposits that we couldnt access before, but the price to extract it kept going up. There will always be more oil somewhere the issue just becomes if it’s economical to get to it. So far since 2018 we’ve seen no new discoveries or breakthroughs that could prop it up longer. It seems like it’s on the decline now. Even if we find a way to get more hard to access oil zones the cost will be even higher. So nations that are reliant on oil become more and more economically fragile over time.
We will see. There have been predictions about peak oil before but then new technologies unlocked previously inaccessible deposits. So i don’t have a really good feel for how long exactly they can keep kicking this particular can down the road. It may be longer than we think.
The real impetus for change is going to have to also be political, not just purely economic. Driven by the increasingly undeniable reality of climate change rather than price inflation, since prices can be manipulated in a lot of ways by governments and by cartels like OPEC.
Of course it also helps that renewable technologies are rapidly becoming more economically appealing while fossil fuels are getting more expensive, but i think that leaning too much into the notion that change has to be driven by economic considerations is not such a great idea.
Because that leaves the door open to the possibility that if somehow the problems of prices and scarcity weren’t there then we wouldn’t need to ditch fossil fuels. But even if fossil fuels were endless and free, we would still need to transition away from them asap.
Well that’s the thing. New technologies unlocked new deposits that we couldnt access before, but the price to extract it kept going up. There will always be more oil somewhere the issue just becomes if it’s economical to get to it. So far since 2018 we’ve seen no new discoveries or breakthroughs that could prop it up longer. It seems like it’s on the decline now. Even if we find a way to get more hard to access oil zones the cost will be even higher. So nations that are reliant on oil become more and more economically fragile over time.