You never answered the original question. 

Fossil fuels happen to be there in convenient form, thus distorting the market price of what it's actually worth. Sure it's convenient to "live off of savings" and not have to do any more work, but I thought you libertarians were against that sort of thing. Why not price oil at it's true price? (the price of a corpse plus 65 million years interest). At least that will prevent the constant dipping into savings.

its price is what the market dictates, its not based off some retarded philosophical garbage. and its market price would be even lower if we were allowed to use our own oil. we have hundreds  thousands of years of oil left, and it is debated whether or not more is currently being made, and by the time we run out, or by the time it becomes economically unviable to drill and extract it, will will have efficient, practicle and cost efficient green energy. in the mean time im using oil and coal. thank you.

When you read things like the amount of methane gas emitted from livestock (aka cow pies and farts) contributing more greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere than the exhaust from all the cars around the world combined every year, kinda makes you think twice about support the rush to destroy our economies in the name of Mother Gaia.

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?newsID=20772&CR1=warning

@KillerzX

That's because the consumers have not set the boundaries that dictate a healthy market (where they don't get ripped off). Gas consumers don't spend with their wallets, they are chained to a slavery system and have no word in the price of the service they're getting. Pur that in your pipe and smoke it friend.

@nightdragon83

Do we need that many cows though? Another lifestyle change possible through conscienciousness.

Oil companies do not get subsidies, they get tax breaks.  In other words, they do not get taxpayer money, like the bankrupt Solyndra did, they just get to keep more of their own moeny to further invest in their companies.  Why this administration wishes to change the meaning of subsidies is beyond me.  Actually, that's a lie, I know why they do it.  To give gullible people a new enemy to target.  The fact remains that green energy is not efficient enough yet to power a whole country.  Just imagine how much land would be taken away from humans and animals to put up enough windmills and solar panels to power the entire country, plus new electric cars for everyone.  And how are we going to power jets for over 4 hrs on electric?

@ OP

I believe we do have an impact on the atmosphere, but it is so small compared to forces that occur naturally that it isn't enough to even bother with.  The only way we could change the climate is if we plugged up every volcano (above and below the ground), so there is no CO₂ sprayed into the atmosphere.  Then you can plug every animal and human's ass, so they didn't release methane when they passed gas or used the bathroom.  Have to get them all to stop breathing, as well.  Oh, and while you're at it, tell the ocean and the organisms in it to stop functioning as normal, since that contributes a lot of CO₂ and N₂O, as well as water vapor.

This is your issue. You're trying to treat a finite resource to market conditions, in which "exhaustion" is not a predicted outcome. 

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). 

I DONT THINK SO...

Not that much, and that's at current technology. Pump in a couple of billions research grants and subsidies and I'm sure we'll have a lot more efficient solar power generation in no time.

Ofcourse combining it with nuclear, hydro electric, wind, geothermal will greatly reduce this.

The problem is it's still cheaper to use what we have in place now. Replacing infrastructure is very expensive, but it will create a lot of jobs. At some point we'll have to move to a hydrogen fuel cell economy for all our transportation needs, cheap oil won't last forever and batteries just aren't efficient enough for the job. And we better start the transition before oil becomes very expensive.
Too bad humans don't react until it's too late.

And the climate? Yes ofcourse we've slowly been changing it. There didn't used to be billions of farm animals adding all these green house gasses to the air for example. We've drastically changed the landscape all over the earth, introduced new chemicals, changed the flow of rivers, literally moved mountains of earth etc etc.
The contents of the atmosphere has changed and we're definately helping. Nobody can really predict how far we can push the earth though. Probably pretty far, life will go on, oceans won't burn off, rain will still fall. Whether our lifestyle survives is another thing.

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?

If the money that has been wasted developing wind, solar and/or fast breeder reactors had been directed towards liquid salt thorium breeder reactors we would have enough safe, clean and efficient energy today to produce as much power for everyone in the world to have a much higher standard of living than people in western developed nations currently have.