| Rath said: That's only oil sands, there's a lot of conventional oil out there still too. I'm not saying we're going to run out straight away - just that we're going to start having less than before. With the current rate of oil discovery compared to the current rate of oil consumption it simply isn't sustainable forever. Peak oil doesn't mean all oil is going to stop, it just means it will slowly wind down. |
On top of that, the main issue isn't how much oil there is left in the ground. When peak oil is reached, by definition at least half the available resources will still be there. The issue is that production cannot keep up with demand, thus the price keeps going up. One major problem with this isn't just the cost of fuel; petrochemicals are used in pretty much every industrial process today. So as the price of oil goes up, so does the price of everything due to increased material, manufacturing and transportation costs. This includes food.
One knock-on effect is that the price of construction alternative energy needs to be bootstrapped by using existing, oil-dependent processes. So waiting for the worst-case to develop inevitable alternatives is just making the situation much harder to overcome when it comes to crunch time, with a ton of unneeded pollution alonge the way.
