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Comment by happytiger | Hacker News Reader

My first thought was your last statement. Absolutely spot on

Also, oil is pretty good at powering engines but utterly essential for making things.

Rotating machinery, linear machinery, turbine oil for wind farms, dielectric oil used in transformers and other HV electronics, cooling oil, cutting oil, gearboxes, almost all plastics, and hydraulics are all essentially oil based processes.

The reason machinery can run for any significant length of time? It’s almost always oil.

If it moves, it likely has oil in it. People really only think of it as a fuel for vehicles, but it is so very, very much more important for its other roles.

As potent as it is for a fuel, we should be focused on not burning it as it’s essential for civilization in ways people do not broadly realize yet.

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But the quantities needed for the rest of the applications are so much smaller.

It’s about 25% of every barrel we pull out of the ground. It’s not insignificant.

Then we could avoid the worst sources such as tar sands, fracking, arctic deep sea etc.

Burning it in search of its replacements is a decent idea as well, though.

We know the replacements for oil for energy, especially electrical demand, we're just unwilling to go through the social changes and costs to get there quickly. The US and Europe could have been on an entirely nuclear and renewable energy mix for electricity a decade ago if the social will had been there to force it but there's a lot of money in the existing industries to lobby against that.

Well, there's a lot of lobbying from Greenpeace that's set nuclear back a few decades. It's not just industry.

Industry is the real money behind it though. The waste disposal issue in the US because we don't reprocess our spent fuel was a legitimate issue but it was over reacted too along with big scares like Chernobyl and TMI. Singular events like that stick out a lot more than the slow poisoning from coal and gas plants but that's just a fact of human psychology and the difficultly of definitively attributing deaths to slow environmental poisons like that.

It might be the real money (who knows), but I think public and political sentiment was massively swayed by Greenpeace.

On the other hand, even here and even today people argue "if we don't do it someone else will" to resist switching from oil to anything else. So I wouldn't blame it on the industrial lobby, or at least not entirely. The status quo is a powerful argument.

Isn’t that the plot of Waterworld?

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