The World Will Never Run Out Of Oil | Hacker News Reader

The World Will Never Run Out Of Oil

news.yahoo.com

5 pointsjkuria10 comments

This article is wrong.

  As oil becomes scarce, consumers will necessarily turn to
  an alternative before the supply runs out.

When something has become so scarce that it is necessary for everybody to turn to an alternative, you've run out of it. Yes, the world will always have oil, but it will gradually become so expensive that you can't buy it for any reasonable amount of money. We'll run out of oil in the same way that we've run out of bottles of wine from the 1600's: some will exist, but nobody can do anything with it because it's so rare and hard to get.

I think this is the article's point. Which leaves one wondering why it was written.

The article is correct and you are wrong for two reasons:

1) If oil is still available - that means it did not run out. Even if oil is expensive.

2) There is plenty of oil. It's just hard to drill for most of it. With increasing oil price less accessible oil will be drilled out.

3) Oil can be synthesized. Currently it's cheaper to drill for oil than synthesize it.

So comparing oil to 1600 wine is incorrect.

4) Oil is still very cheap. That's why it's so popular.

This article is /right/.

We won't wake up one day and be all "oh shit we ran out of oil". These things work on a gradient, yo.

As the market prices in upcoming oil scarcity, so prices will initially rise. The price of oil today prices in future scarcity. As the price gradually increases, other alternatives start to come online from a financial viability perspective. As more money is spent on those alternatives, so economies of scale start to kick on, so new R&D resource is spent on alternatives, so governments jumpy about energy security subsidize, etc.

If you want a natural resource to get all paranoid about, in ~20 years, South East Asia will have a 300m person gender imbalance - there will be 300m men who can't find a wife, can't start a family, can't settle down, and can't get laid. I wanna see how the market solves /that/ one.

  We won't wake up one day and be all "oh shit we ran out of
  oil". These things work on a gradient, yo.

After seeing how well corporations have dealt with IP addresses, I'm not so sure about this. Add in the possibility of a random war suddenly quadrupling the price of oil, and the fact that it might take twenty-plus years to switch the energy industry over to another technology, and I find it very believable that we'll wake up one day and be all "oh shit we can't produce enough energy."

  South East Asia will have a 300m person gender imbalance

True. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how we can deal with that one at all, given that it's already happened. I'm lumping it in with tsunamis and pandemics rather than resource depletion.

About the gender imbalance, it's easy - dowry is still very prevalent in India and other parts of Asia. Which is what skews the numbers in favor of men (people abort female babies on a regular basis to avoid paying dowry when they grow up). When people realize there aren't that many females to go around, the dowry concept will reverse, it will be men paying to get married. Then the economic incentives will reverse, and the ratios will balance. That's how the market solves it. Hopefully by then rising prosperity and gender equality will eliminate this practice before the scales tip the other way again.

Longer term, yes, absolutely. Also: rising personal wealth tends to sort the problem out too...

But, the children who are going to cause this problem have already been born. Takes 14-18 years to grow a girl of marriageable age, depending on where you live...

Maybe a sophisticated market in wife futures will emerge.

This article is very absurd.

Everyone knows that oil (and other material resource on Earth) is a finite resource - which means at some point, the planet will run out of it.

Economics would dictate that other energy sources would be developed (and is already prevalent) that would take away oil away from the big part of the equation.

OK, fine. We won't run out of oil, it will just be prohibitively expensive, especially for fuel applications.

(I've always thought it was a shame to burn such an interesting chemical feedstock anyway.)

The world will never run out of oil because once we realize that we are running out of oil, we'll try to stop using oil.

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