Quote:
Originally Posted by AC_Hacker
It would be in your interest to research transportation and what is the ultimate source of the fuel used in transportation for: - Air Transport
- Rail Transport
- Road Transport
- Sea Transport
It would be very useful for you, in future conversations, to know for yourself, what fuels are used and to what extent is transportation important to the many aspects of the way of life that we experience.
This will make you completely free of the encumbrance of BP advertisements.
-AC_Hacker |
Ultimate as in fundamental, or final, or something else? We use oil because it was or is the cheapest in up front costs and has a lot of mature infrastructure, but I don't think that means it's ultimate in any sense. We have used, do use, and will use in greater amounts other energy sources for transport as oil becomes more expensive due to supply/demand as well as accurate pricing of externalized costs.
What I don't understand is how people seem to use sufficient and necessary interchangeably. Oil is sufficient for different forms of transportation, but not necessary for them, just like it is for a bunch of other things.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MN Renovator
It isn't just transportation. Don't forget that without oil we will lose plastics, a majority of our large crop fertilizers. The impact on food will be one of the biggest issues. Of course that rolls back to transportation again, all of the goods, foods, and products we use aren't built or produced in the city we live in and for most of us, local production would take some time to get started, it wouldn't happen quick enough. If tomorrow we had a deep oil crises the economy would tank.
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Oil is mostly used in large crop pesticides and plastics, natural gas is where we get most of our fertilizer. Oil prices have some impact on food prices, but as a whole it's a lot less than other things like plastics. IIRC oil is only like a third of all agricultural energy inputs, and most of that is used to run farm machinery and transport food. Big, but not that big, and it's not impossible by any means to minimize or eliminate oil in ag. Similarly, plastics require about 5% of world oil production, which is large, but not impossible to replace.