fordy said:
Oh, and I love your fabricated estimate of how much oil we have remaining. Now here are the real figures from the IEAs World Energy Outlook report: In 2009, PROVEN oil reserves worldwide amounts to 1354 billion barrels. You can speculate how much is left out there, but until you have actual proof that there are still trillions of barrels of oil remaining, it's just that; speculation. In 2009, the rate of demand is 84 million barrels per day. Now, given that the demand remains CONSTANT (which is impossible. Demand will rise as it has mostly for the past 50 years), we will have a little over 44 years of oil. I'm sorry, but I think that's a liiiiittle under the thousands of years of oil that you spouted. Similar calculations were made for coal, which amounted to anywhere from 150 to 350 years, depending on demand and the added demand once oil reserves are gone. That figure was, at the time, being incredibly generous, I might add. You ARE forgetting that when this increase in price to be economically unviable happens, where do we turn to? After all, no subsidies towards alternatives means no reserach into making the technology efficient enough. The oil/coal exhaustion will hit quicker than newer technologies can effectively produce, thus there will be an instant overdemand for energy (it wont be a small transition. The news will be sudden in order to keep stock prices going as long as possible). What you fail to understand is the subsidy towards renewables is to simulate a period of demand for energy in order to kickstart (or boost) reserach and innovation towards a viable alternative, so we are prepared when stocks of fossil fuels are exhausted (which is a LOT sooner than you think. Do your research). |
proven, there you go.
we are constantly finding "new" oil reserves, and we will continue to do so. i dont have exact numbers, but the number of proven oil reserves has gone up constantly as year progress. in the year 1000 there wasnt very much if at all proven reserves. did that mean oil didnt exist back then?







