The world will move away from oil when the alternatives are more economical. Any other conclusion is magical thinking.

But this can be (and is) manipulated by government policy and social dynamics. The externalities of the fossil fuel energy binge are becoming increasingly impossible to ignore, which is depressing demand.

Do you think Africa, China, India all think like that? Most of whom are living on or below the poverty line? They'll be driving old put-puts and crappy desel trucks, tractors and cars for tens of years to come. How long before second/third hand electric cars are being exported in tens or hundreds of thousands to these countries? 50 years?

No one I know drives a NEW car, and I live in the UK. We all wait for 2nd/3rd hand cars to get to us.

Well India has very large kerosene subsidies for the poor, which they are managing to cut because prices have fallen. Replacing these with solar subsidies would make a huge difference, and cut fossil fuel use. And e-rickshaws took off quite fast.

The UK had new car sales of almost 2.5 million last year, ridiculously high, the highest in Europe, thats almost 10% of households bought a new car/

10% of households bought a new car, and that means that the average lifespan of a car with its FIRST owner must be on average 10 years. Cars might last 20-30 years in the UK as the previous poster pointed out, and longer in the rest of Europe which is already "rich" relative to India. I think you're proving his point exactly.

> 10% of households bought a new car, and that means that the average lifespan of a car with its FIRST owner must be on average 10 years.

Maybe I need more coffee, but wouldn't that only be true if every household only bought new cars?

In any case, we don't have to guess these things. Simple search found that in 2011 the mean car age on UK roads was 7.44 years. Even accounting for the long tail, that's actually pretty good.

Ah, excellent point. Yup, I got that one wrong!

Yes. Dirt cheap (new) solar panels have been sprouting all over Africa, India and China in the last couple of years. It's quite a sight to behold, sometimes.

These panels became such a 'threat' that Obama slapped tariffs on them.

I think you're being a bit pessimistic. People in third world countries love status symbols and want to do their part too. In the eighties, when Datsuns were all the rage in Pakistan, my grandfather was one of the very few to track down an imported used Australian Ford Laser sedan, which was surprisingly cheap (probably smuggled through Dubai).

Until recently, Pakistan had one of the highest adoption rates in the world of CNG in cars as an alternative to petrol, you could just flip a switch when you were cruising on a flat. We modified our Laser (may it rest in peace) accordingly.

The problem is that the market price of oil an coal don't reflect the long term costs of their use.

Renewable energy has all of its costs right up front. Fossil fuels have major deferred costs which allow the market to act without concern for the consequences.

Which is yet another reason that the market is dumb and should not be trusted with important decisions.

Another way to look at it is that the market is smart, but like any other information processing system, can only make the right decisions if given the right inputs. For the market to make the right decisions about energy policy, the real costs of oil and coal need to be priced in, by applying pollution taxes.

All other alternatives are more economical when oil's externalities are priced in. Oil has been cheating, so can we fix that?

It can be fixed by highlighting politicians' use of the oil industry's money to fund their campaigns and calling them rude names when they do it (and equally, by saying nice things about politicians who don't...).

If it becomes politically unpalatable they will stop taking oil industry money. If the oil industry loses its seat at the policy table they will lose power, followed by money, followed by influence. It's a vicious (or virtuous) circle, depending upon how you look at it.

But that could happen by taxing the externalities of oil, ie. a carbon tax.

fossil fuels are economical only because the environment does not ever sue for damages.

Hm, sounds like a great argument for taxing and regulation.

I don't think the article is saying that we should. In fact, it's talking about Saudi Arabia's efforts to move on themselves. They apparently even created a University with guards so that students and professors can exist w/o the typical religious expectations of their society.

Agreed. We don't and shouldn't follow. We should continue with developing currently existing and new technologies to loosen the worlds dependency on oil.

While also figuring out how to make fossil fuel safer for the environment.

Don't get me wrong, solar/wind and especially nuclear are great, but it's gonna be a loooong time before we're completely rid of gas, coal and oil.

There's so much of it and they're all so energy-dense and/or cheap that humans are gonna use them either until our planet turns into Venus or we figure out ways to reduce/eliminate those emissions. I'd prefer the latter.

By the way, oil is only part of the problem - http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/sources.html (not that we shouldn't try to reduce the amount of oil imported from Saudi Arabia and friends).

Another thing people seem to forget is that plastic requires oil. It's relatively easy to move from gas to electric cars, I don't know of an alternative for plastic production however.

For at least "important" uses of plastic you can make it from plants. I haven't looked to see how the volume of plastic consumed compares to, say, the corn crop though.

The chemical industry requires oil and gas as both a raw material and a source of industrial heat. The fossil-derived industrial heat may be replaced by electricity produced from various sources, including nuclear. Secondly, if electricity becomes relatively abundant, that could create an economy completely independent on fossil fuel, since you can convert just about any generic organic matter (and ultimately from CO2 and water) into chemical products.

It's not a large fraction of the oil market. It's also less bad from a CO2 perspective as it ends up ""sequestered"" in landfills and oceans.

silicone plastics, like modern bakeware.

Can you make plastic without oil?

Haven't we been moving away from oil for at least 40 years, since the U.S. oil crisis in the 1970's? Carter put solar energy in the White House. Are we on the 100 plan to move away from oil?

> Carter put solar energy in the White House.

Carter put solar cells (PV) on the White House. Reagan had them removed.

Obama recently installed them again, but it's a mere 10kW, IIRC.

Not quite. Carter's White House solar panels were thermal.

“a generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people; harnessing the power of the Sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.”

During Reagan's administration, the panels were moved to Unity College in Maine where they heated water on the campus.

I think we're running into the weeds. The point is that we've been trying to move off oil for 40 years. At this rate it's going to be a very long time before the job is done.

In fact, we might run out of oil before we actually replace it.

In the 70's and early 80's economical small Japanese cars were bought in droves. Replacing the giant US gas gusslers of the 60's and 70's.

90's, 2000's oil got cheap again (or was in supply at least) and what was the hottest car model?, gigantic gas gussling SUV's?

We move away from high prices. That is all.

And what the government has been moving away from since the 70's is dependence on foreign oil. A small part of which is renewables and efficiency. But larger part has been domestic production nukes and natural gas (which US has lots of).

> Haven't we been moving away from oil for at least 40 years, since the U.S. oil crisis in the 1970's?

That crisis affected a bit more than just the U.S.

No, consumption fell in the 1970s and 1980s, but rose again after that, until the 2008 crisis, when it did fall again. But it is higher than the time of the oil shock.

I think you missed the rhetorical question. The world has been trying to move away from fossil fuels since at least the 1970's. We've spent billions (trillions?) on research, tax credits, ethanol in gas, etc and it seems like we've barely moved the needle. WTF?

It's interesting to read about a new super efficient solar cell on HN every few months, but at some point shouldn't we try to figure out what'll it really take to solve our energy problem?

We don't, but it's the path with diminishing resistance as the price of oil drops further.

We don't have to go along with this plan. We could raise taxes on oil and drive SA into the ground. The world would be a better place without oil being part of our energy production.

This would also raise prices on gas and petroleum products (such as lubricants, cosmetics, plastics) on Americans which probably isn't a good idea given the current state of affairs for the low and middle classes.

So give poor Americans more money. Then they can choose whether to use that on petrol or not.

Some people do try to move away where practical. But if you really look at everything you do in a day, petroleum products are everywhere. Even if you take electric-powered transportation (or walk/bike), and run your own solar panels for electricity, and grow all your own food using hand tools... you still probably use plastic somewhere in your life.

But plastic isn't really a big deal when it comes to petroleum consumption. There was an amusing quote I read some time ago, in which the author hypothesized that in hundreds of years, people will be shocked that we as a civilization just lit petroleum (or distillates) on fire, or blew it up in engines, given how incredibly useful it is for things like plastics.

To what? Lithium Ion battery production?

That's just as bad as oil, and in some cases worse.

This type of manufacturing process requires tremendous inputs of energy, particularly the forging of materials like steel, aluminum, glass and plastic. Interestingly, lightweight vehicles can sometimes be more energy-intensive to build than heavier cars because lighter metals like aluminum are harder to forge than stainless steel [source: Moon]. Experts estimate that 10 to 20 percent of a vehicle's total lifetime greenhouse gas emissions are released during the manufacturing stage alone

Unfortunately, both nickel-hydride batteries and the newer lithium-ion batteries rely on the mining of nickel, copper and so-called rare earth metals. The production of lithium-ion batteries account for 2 to 5 percent of total lifetime hybrid emissions and nickel-hydride batteries are responsible for higher sulfur oxide emissions, roughly 22 pounds (10 kilograms) per hybrid compared with 2.2 pounds (about 1 kilogram) for a conventional vehicle [sources: Samaras and Burnham et al].

source: http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-my...

It's only just as bad as oil, and in some cases worse, if you charge the batteries with electricity produced from coal. Stop doing that (or just don't start; most places get a majority of their electricity from non-coal sources) and you're doing way better.

This idea that battery production is more environmentally harmful than burning gasoline is largely a myth pushed by people who are politically opposed to alternative fuels. See also the infamous (and infamously wrong) article from a few years back claiming that a Hummer is less environmentally harmful over its lifetime than a Prius.

One relevant consideration is that e.g. aluminum manufacturing, while energy-intensive, is also renewable-friendly. That is, suppose you have a gigawatt of solar panels. You can't use them for lighting at night without also supplying storage. But aluminum smelting can just run when the sun shines, and can be located wherever the sun is most available. Or put another way, aluminum is a good form in which to store renewable energy.

see also icelandic geothermal aluminum smelting industry.