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Comment by KevinGlass | Hacker News Reader

I believe we've avoided a civilization ending, peak oil disaster. Currently ~35-50% of global energy consumption (including shipping, automobiles, etc) comes from petroleum. You might say, that's a lot!, and you would be right. But the percentage of total energy consumption petroleum takes up is going down. Over the next 50 years petroleum will get more and more expensive and renewables will continue to get cheaper and cheaper. If another energy source is cheaper, it will win.

If one of the many "super battery breakthroughs" we've all read about in the last 15 years comes to fruition in the next 15 then consider the oil crisis solved.

Yes, converting everything to electricity will be expensive but that's cheaper then relying on oil. The trend lines look promising. Of course this is all speculation based on the Western world being able to keep it's shit together.

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Relying on price mechanisms alone probably still means we will use almost all fossil fuel that is in proven reserves though, and that means civilization ending levels of climate change.

We need a way to keep lots of oil in the ground even if it is profitable to get out.

Isn’t that the premise behind the “carbon coin”?

Their point is that oil will only continue to have value if it's kept scarce, and that because there are viable and growing affordable options away from petroleum where there wasn't 10-20 years ago, we will have both a tug of war between producers keeping it in the ground to keeps prices high while their net market shrinks consistently until we're really only left with oil utility where the economy of the resource makes sense (if any). The energy sector will have moved on to the most exploitable sources of power in whatever shape that looks like due to innovation.

> price mechanisms alone probably still means we will use almost all fossil fuel that is in proven reserves

Unlikely. Exploration and production is capital intensive because there are minimum scales many projects require to be profitable, e.g. pipelines.

High prices amid falling volumes can obscure the production destruction inherent to infrastructure first ceasing to be developed and then being actively shut down. Whale oil prices went up amidst depletion and decommissioning [1].

[1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.38...

Not just (potentially) civilization-ending levels of climate change—but the near-certainty that, if civilization does end, losing us our current industry and expertise, it will be massively harder to get back to the point we are today, because oil is the conveniently concentrated and portable energy bootstrap that got us this far.

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