Without petroleum, the world today looks a lot more like 1930 than it does 2020.
Yes, it may have given us some material benefits, but now it is clear that it is hurtling the human race towards extinction (and likely much life on earth with it).
I suggest you are misreading the argument.
This has been known by Exxon for ~40 years, and they have worked to suppress and sow disinformation.
Can you elaborate? The response seems incoherent.
Most of it comes from electricity production, industry, and agriculture. I guess flying an airplane is an easy target. But it really shows the actual motives when someone holds it up as an example if how we're destroying the planet.
There's a whole lot of unaddressed middle between "give up all oil and make the world look like 1930" and "wilfully hide the truth in order to give us 2020 tech."
How about, "As a democracy, have a debate about long-term problems with a core part of society in reasonable time to address them?
But are you thinking about bottles, bags, flooring, roofing, insulation, clothes, etc?
The amount of products with oil uselessly baked in without concern to the environmental impact is incredible. Plastics have many great alternatives.
A defense of oil based on it's usefulness is not an excuse for the current state of oil usage. Stop it.
It’s not heroin, it’s more like some sort of intelligence drug with terrible side effects seen much later.
It’s a Faustian bargain we’ve all benefited from in innumerable ways.
Lots can be said about the tradeoffs of industrial civilization. We now see that it is leading us to extinction.
It's like bacteria in a petri dish, for 50 years it accelerated our consumption of our limited resources and made the petri dish increasingly hostile to life within it.
We all know how the story of bacteria in a petri dish turns out.
Now you're born into a society of heroin consumers, and to some degree you're also addicted to it.
Is it the fault of the consumers that the world now runs on heroin? Especially considering that the heroin producers have known for 40 years, and have spent BILLIONS lying to the public and government?