Paul's Comments

I answer questions on Yahoo! answers because it's fun and sometimes the questions make me learn things, even if it's just a realization of things I already knew, just hadn't vocalized it yet.

A question someone asked read as follows:

What will happen if the world run out of Fossil Resource?

I have to write a Persuasive Essay. I need a to write about the difficulty if the world run out of energy resource (Fossil Resource) to support my essay. Can anyone share me some idea please.

I gave the following response:

We'll probably try something else. As the price goes up, those who can't afford it are driven out of the market. This makes other alternatives which were unaffordable because of cost of development vs. price now in line.

There are fossil technologies we are not using even now. Most cars do not run on natural gas and nothing runs on coal.

Current estimates are that we can probably expect to find as much as 300 years of current usage in petroleum, if the price gets high enough it might even be longer. Also, if that happens, other technologies then become affordable. Coal gassification or liquefaction. Conversion to natural gas.

If fossil fuels become completely unaffordable, then we turn to much more massive use of wind and solar power. Cover the deserts in solar panels and wind farms. Start converting streets and highways to have catenaries and connect vehicles to the grid. Convert vehicles over to battery power and recharge from our electrical grid at night.

Right now there's huge amounts of wind flowing over large parts of the country, but you have to use wind power at the time it's created, you can't really store electricity effectively for massive use, and the best times for wind power are at night when most heavy usage is off the grid.

If fossil fuels become exorbitantly expensive, we'd have no choice but to convert to battery powered equipment and develop better methods of delivering solar, wind and hydroelectric power to the grid so that our battery-powered equipment could be recharged.

We are dependent upon mechanized equipment just to collect the food we need to eat and to transport it to the stores; we have to keep that distribution system running or we starve; the average city is 7 days from hunger and two weeks from cannibalism. The farms and shipping companies probably can convert to electrical-based systems without too much trouble because farm equipment stays close to the house and could have batteries that are recharged, and large trucks mostly use interstate highways, and could be set up with catemaries to pick up power, and batteries to store when off the grid.

We would have to make choices, there would be extremely painful reallocations of resources as a result of those choices, but eventually we would find a solution. Or we would perish. It's that simple. If fossil fuels become unavailable, we have to find a substitute or we die.