"People tend to think of alternatives to oil as somehow independent from oil. In reality, the alternatives to oil are more accurately described as "derivatives of oil." It takes massive amounts of oil and other scarce resources to locate and mine the raw materials (silver, copper, platinum, uranium, etc.) necessary to build solar panels, windmills, and nuclear power plants. It takes more oil to construct these alternatives and even more oil to distribute them, maintain them, and adapt current infrastructure to run on them. ...
"it is still possible for the world economy to run on a basket of alternative sources of energy - so long as we immediately get all of the following:
A few dozen technological breakthroughs;
Unprecedented political will and bipartisan cooperation;
Tremendous international collaboration;
Massive amounts of investment capital,
Fundamental reforms to the structure of the international banking system;
No interference from the oil-and-gas industries;
About 25-50 years of general peace and prosperity to retrofit the world's $45 trillion dollar per year economy, including transportation and telecommunications networks, manufacturing base, and agricultural systems to run on these new sources of energy;
If we get all of the above, we might be able to get the energy equivalent of 3-5 billion barrels of oil per year from alternative sources.
That's a tremendous amount of oil - about as much as the entire world used per year during World War II, but it's nowhere near enough to keep our currently mammoth-sized yet highly volatile global economic system going. The world currently requires over 30 billion barrels/1.2 trillion gallons of oil per year to support economic growth. That requirement will only increase as time goes on due to population growth, debt servicing, and the industrialization of countries like China and India.
So even if the delusionally optimistic scenario described above is somehow miraculously manifested, we're still facing a full-blown meltdown of petrochemical civilization.
In short, hoping renewables will keep the age of entropy at bay is like hoping pissing in the Mississippi river will cause it to reverse course.
- Matt Savinar, lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
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