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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ichy Smith who wrote (198845)	8/23/2006 3:37:20 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 281500

We already are much more efficient in terms of inflation adjusted dollars created per amount of oil used. That should only increase if the current relatively high oil prices are sustained (I say relatively high because the real prices aren't nearly as different from past prices as the nominal prices would make it seem, prices still are high, but they are similar to 1981). Since 1980 a lot of progress has been made on technologies for alternate fuels and ways to lower fuel use. A lot of these technologies are not in widespread use, or at least not in near universal use because it doesn't make economic sense to use them. Bio fuels including alcohol have their own problems and can only be a small part of the solution. Other forms of alternate energy are often way to expensive even with today's high fuel prices. We might not be far away from some of them being competitive, but it still takes decades and hundreds of billions, maybe trillions of dollars to make such major changes. "25 years" is not a long time in this context. I imagine we will still be using a lot of oil 50 years from now, even if it is a lower portion of our fuel and energy use. Look how long it took to implement our full infrastructure for oil. Changes on this scale take a lot of time and money. If you try to reduce the time significantly than you increase the cost, make us pay it over a shorter time, and increase the chance of picking a poor replacement technology.