Squilliam said:
A.) How many planes, boats, rail cars, road vehicles, chainsaws, diggers etc can you power directly from either natural gas or coal? B.) How do you build up finite resource that you're depleting? Answer: You don't. You can find more, you can expend ever increasing effort to extract more but you don't magically create the stuff. Anyway hopefully in 40 years time doesn't cut it because depletion is already cutting the supply of conventional oil. Why else do you think Shell is drilling in the Arctic? If they had any better prospects anywhere else in the world don't you think they'd try to drill those first? Why, pray tell do you think that the capital expenditure for companies like ExonMobil are increasing and yet the relative share of oil production remains flat? Why do you think that drilling activity in the U.S.A. recently fell from an all time high and yet production is only half of that in the 1970s? http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/historical_oil_prices_chart.asp We simply cannot get oil out of the ground fast enough and cheaply enough to satisfy demand which is why the price is so high. Natural gas is no substitute, nor is coal. You can exchange coal for natural gas for most things and anywhere where the utility of the energy suplied is less valuable than sheer BTUs you already the substitution has already happened, the areas where it hasn't happened, haven't because they either can't or it is extremely impractical. |
That's just not true. It would be very practical to implement natural gas in cars for example... and pretty cheap.
Oil is in fine condition still, you can tell by the fact that we still aren't tapping into COUNTLESS areas with oil that have been named "off limits".
Hell, offshore drilling was just recently brought back on the table in part of Obama's plan to "Outflank the Republicans" by suddenly getting way more conservative. Like his extremely harsh actions recently against legal (state wise) Marijuana dealers.








