As oil prices go up, other options become economically viable. Higher price point allows alternatives to emerge. No biggie. The Economist regularly runs articles on developments in alternative fuels, as posters have noted everything from carbon capture to algae based plastics and fuels. Some of it is purely speculative, other stuff is being ramped up for commercial production as we speak.
To posters earlier in the thread, some dude back in the 50s may have come up with a car part that could have made cars incredibly fuel efficient. That doesn't mean it was commercially viable -- it might have been a bitch to produce in mass quantities, it might have been incredibly dangerous, or it might have just been too expensive to be worth using. Car companies don't make a dime for producing cars that use more oil, but they do now compete on MPG (among other things). There's every reason to believe that if a viable high efficiency element existed, they'd toss it in because it'd give them a HUGE advantage amongst cost conscious consumers.
WRT to all the doom and gloom about 'too many people' and 'growth isn't possible', I beg to differ. For one thing, populations have been stabilizing for the past couple of decades; plenty of articles to show that as the odds of a child surviving its earlier years increase and the education (and income) of parents increase, the number of children produced decreases. For another, growth is a function of labor, inputs and productivity. If inputs get more expensive, people will find alternates that work just as well or increase productivity. Both are happening. I mean, you go back a century and it's astounding how much time and effort it took to do something as simple as copy a page of writing. It takes five seconds and a little bit of energy to duplicate it dozens of times now, with each page customized however you want (mail merge ftw?). Same with transporting things from one side of the world to the other. It used to take weeks of travel to cross the Atlantic -- now it's a journey measured in hours. When inputs get more expensive, people use them more efficiently.
Information technology has indeed invalidated a lot of old jobs -- you don't see a bunch of women sitting around in a telephone exchange plugging cords into stuff anymore, do you? Or people making buggy whips, eh? So what. The people who would have worked in the jobs invalidated by a program or a new piece of technology (like, say, cashiers who were replaced by auto-checkout kiosks) aren't doing that anymore. That doesn't mean that they're sitting on their asses! Instead of paying their wages, the company makes a one time capex (on a program or a piece of hardware that someone had to write or build) and spends the rest that they saved on other stuff. And that stuff generates new jobs for all those folks who were previously stuck in jobs that could have been done by a bot are now doing something else, contributing to the economy in some new way.
Now I'm sure a whole horde of peeps will be like 'the evil capitalists will use automatons to build everything, and not require any labor, ruling over us with their machine slaves and mountains of money'. Nope. That entrepreneur is gonna have to buy things, sell things and process things. A machine can do a lot of cool things, but there's plenty of stuff you need a human for. Like, say, designing an ad campaign or writing a story or a program or as a lawyer or accountant or handling customers or generally getting any number of other service jobs done. Plenty of factories scaled down their labor force to a tenth of what it was before, and then gave those employees much higher paychecks to manage the machines. More factories, more efficient use of inputs, new inputs and new sectors. I, for one, look forward to a future where 3D printers replace the traditional concept of manufacturing, and people no longer have to sit in a factory somewhere plugging away at dull and unrewarding jobs for the rest of their lives.
The future will be wondrous.
Then there's the folks bitching about government. Surprise, government is slow. It's supposed to be slow, because things work pretty well the way they are, and we the people don't much want them to change at the drop of a hat -- after all, America got to the top of the pile on this system, how likely is it that someone came up with an even better system? Sure, there's some corruption, there's waste, there's idiocy. But if you don't like the guys in office, YOU CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. How? GO VOTE IN A PRIMARY. Primary voters in the United States have enormous power, mostly due to the districting regime we have at present (something California is just now getting rid of, so it's hoped that the rest of the states will ditch it too eventually). Candidates who are members of the dominant party in a district who win the primary for their party tend to win the general election. And since primary voters tend to be nutbags and hardcore insaneocrats, as well as a tiny fraction of the population of the district, the politicians elected tend to represent them and not the moderate sane folks.
IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT, GO VOTE IN A PRIMARY. Your (hopefully) saner vote can make a huge difference, especially if you get your friends to come along. If you vote for the smart, sane candidates in primaries, you'll get to see them win the general election and enter office with moderate policies that you like. And if candidates see that moderate talk wins primaries that is how they will talk and that is what they will do.
The Tea Party folks aren't dominant because of magic. They're able to control candidates by showing up to primaries and dominating there, and by threatening office holders who don't toe the party line a primary challenge (from a candidate with their support). There's no conspiracy, just democracy in action. And if you don't like it, you need to show up and do something about it. Democracy is about working to make the change you want to see in the world real, not waiting and hoping and moaning on the internet. If you don't work, it won't happen.
So if you guys are worried about the future, use the tools the founders and subsequent governments gave you and get to work.
(Note, the Euros are living under all sorts of different systems, where they may or may not be able to mount primary challenges or directly elect favored candidates. SA is all sorts of screwy, and I'm pretty sure that voting in Brazil is 9/10ths crap shoot and list management, specifically using high value low brain vote grabbers to send votes to technocrats, by the parties)
When someone knows for sure that oil has peaked, please let me know. I would like to short crude futures.
Shorting oil futures as prices rise? Great way to lose all your money.
