Originally Posted by Gian55";p=&quot

I hate to burst your bubble, but none of those can replace oil.

Solar panels require a lot of energy to produce (mainly oil) and are very fickle because of weather. Not to mention we need land to feed our population, so where can we put our solar panels? The desert would be the most obvious choice, but that’d require an even greater expenditure of resources because of the lack of infrastructure in a baron wasteland. Solar still doesn't solve personal transportation, either.

Water power requires the biggest investment of all because you have to rework entire rivers, lakes, etc. to build dams. Tidal energy has already been proven ineffective.

Wind power can have energy returns of 50:1 but would require a massive investment now (while oil is cheap), but, thanks to the beauty of capitalism, that WONT happen because there's no demand. But when there is, we'll be in tough luck because of high oil prices.

Nuclear is safer than widely believed, but requires a tremendous investment of resources and capital. Not to mention the world's uranium reserves will run out by 2025. Again, we need to start build them now to prepare for the upcoming energy crisis, but people don’t want them in their back yard. Tough luck again.

Plus none of the abovementioned are as cheap as oil, replace oil as a production resource for plastics (and other products), and we'd have to build the infrastructure now. Thanks to capitalism, that wont happen until more people wakeup and see that we're about to hit a brick wall.

The most ideal situation would be using wind power to produce hydrogen (which is actually an energy loser because it takes more energy to make it than it returns). However, the idea of a hydrogen economy is mostly a lie (even Daimler-Chrysler said so) because hydrogen can’t be stored very easily in a vehicle and would require reworking the national infrastructure a truly massive scale.