One correction that bears noting is that we won't RUN OUT of oil anytime in our lifetimes; we won't suddenly reach a spot where our flow of oil suddenly and instantly runs dry. Rather, what will happen well before then is that production will "peak," where we'll see it higher than any other day in history... Which means it'll be just downhill from there.
It'll likely take centuries from that point for oil consumption to disappear completely, but all along the way, supply will continue to contract, but demand will (at the current state) keep increasing. The result would be pretty obvious: prices would go through the roof, and then from there into the stratosphere, and just never stop going up. If oil is still heavily depended upon as it is today, the economic shocks would be tremendous.
Most people wouldn't be able to afford driving, as gas would quickly rise to $10US a gallon, then $100US, and so on. The price on everything would be escalating dramatically, and likely many of the bounties of our modern system would vanish: trucking produce from thousands of miles so anything could be had year-round would end, and cheap imported goods would no longer be an option. A complete new Depression, and possibly a World War, would all but be inevitable.
This is one of the main reasons why a shift away from an oil-based economy is needed soon. Quite simply put, for Americans, the shift from consuming so much oil isn't an environmental issue for bleeding-heart liberals, it's a security issue: oil reliance would readily prove an Achilles Heel to end American power and prominence, and also make life far worse for everyone else in the world, too.
And hey, us enthusiasts would likely see our niche completely vanish, too, as modern technology would cease to be able to advance without economic strength backing it, and the markets for tech would evaporate. That's a terrible thought, now isn't it?
[citation][nom]CKKwan[/nom]And where is ITER and Nuclear Fusion?[/citation]
It's coming along, just not in the headlines; last month they started work on pouring in the foundations. In other words, they're building the basement right now. Of course, I'll admit that the project can't be developed quickly enough: the current projected timetable has the thing not even powering on for the first time until 2019, and true, full-power fusion (where it'd actually be able to produce more than it consumes) wouldn't be until early 2030.
Like many others, I look back at the Apollo program. Just from 1961 through 1969, a change in policy backed by willing idealists and the sufficient funds managed to take the primitive US space program, that was slow, costly, and lagging behind the Soviets, to quickly propel it to one of humanity's most astounding achievements in under a decade. Why can't we muster the will to do this sort of thing again, when arguably so much more is at stake? If $100US billion more would jump-start fusion research to give us commercial fusion power by 2020, by all means it'd be worth it. The return on investment would be astronomical.
[citation][nom]amk-aka-Phantom[/nom]Hell no! I loathe electric vehicles, I tried them and they're SO boring to drive...[/citation]
I know! The fact that they manage to get such tremendous torque, and such a low center of gravity, gripping to the road so well... I want my sluggish, noisy, poor-performing gas-guzzling engine!
[citation][nom]serendipiti[/nom]well, same amount of oil for a ten times bigger population... ?[/citation]
Keep in mind that much of China's population are still agrarian farmers living without even electricity and running water. So China consuming less than the USA isn't a mark of them being more "efficient," it's just a mark of the stark inequality found in the country. It's also why they already surpassed the US in carbon emissions: they might consume less in total, but they're vastly more wasteful with what they have, and the number of citizens who're doing the consuming is growing rapidly... So eventually, we'll have 1+ billion Chinese basically doing the consuming and polluting of 3 USAs... Except that by that time the USA's consumption and pollution will have shrunk even further, as efficiency and cleanliness improve here, but not in China. (China has repeatedly refused to adopt any solid efficiency or emissions standards, arguing that they'd just be attacks on their economic growth)
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