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Comment by vichu | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't be too concerned as renewables and nuclear technology should be at the point where it would be able to pick up the slack - we know the end is coming and we can prepare for it.

An interesting thought experiment is whether or not humans (or some future species) would be able to reproduce the technological advancements that oil enabled given some sort of apocalypse scenario that resets us to year zero.

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I remember watching a video in which it said how most current engineering jobs these days are really just destructive jobs.

They basically take an existing natural resource from the environment and turn it into another form of resource that human could make use of. But this in turn destroys that very same environment we human also live in, effectively wiping out ourselves in the process.

Those engineering jobs basically only convert one form of resource/energy into another, but they actually didn't create anything new out of thin air themselves.

I think it is fair to say most engineers do not violate laws of nature.

Oil isn't somehow magical in any manner - everything that oil does today can be boiled down to supplying kinetic energy. We don't use its chemical properties in any special way, it just happens to be among the most efficient in terms of calories per kg. With advances in battery tech, and large-scale shift to renewables, I think running out of oil is largely a non-issue in the long run (of course we'll have pains in shifting, but there will not be any long term drawbacks)

It is pretty useful as a base for all kinds of chemicals. All plastics for example are made from oil.

> We don't use its chemical properties in any special way, it just happens to be among the most efficient in terms of calories per kg.

As far as I am aware a lot of oil is used as raw material in chemical industry, not only as energy source.

The biggest issue is actually food - most of the seeds grown today are engineered to depend upon fossil-fuel based chemical fertilizers, and cannot actually survive on their own without both the chemical fertilizers and a large helping of herbicides/pesticides/fungicides (many of which are also produced by the chemical industry). Break that dependency and you have to undo the Green Revolution that multiplied agricultural output by 10x. Do that and instead of the world's current food production being able to support a population of 9B if they were all willing to eat a vegetarian diet, you'd be looking at 900M, i.e. about 85% of people on earth would have to die.

I suspect that if you took away all the demand for oil from powering cars, though, there'd be plenty left at reasonable prices for growing food and maybe even flying planes. So you do need some fossil fuel production, but get rid of its use in automobiles, heating, and electricity and the remaining reserves can be allocated much more efficiently.

Oil is not used in the production of fertilizers.

Here's a quote I found in [1]

"The macronutrients required by plants are N (Nitrogen), K (Potassium) and P (Phosphorus). Oil is hydrocarbon, made from H (Hydrogen) and C (Carbon). There are no plant nutrients in oil.

Nitrogen fertilizer (N) is made from ammonia, which in turn is manufactured from natural gas, not oil"

[1] http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2005/08/28-isnt-fertiliz...

> We don't use its chemical properties in any special way,

We do, 99% of plastics is made using fossil fuels. Big players are trying to shift to sustainable alternatives though, for example LEGO: https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news-room/2018/march/pfp

are sure? how many plastics including textiles would have to be replaced if we did not have the chemical properties of oil to create them? Any idea? I bet you are wearing at least one item of clothing with a textiel created with oil chemicals..such as nylon or others

There are processes that create crude oil given energy and some basic resources.

How would you argue that the answer is not, "no"?

I mean, we only really started to use oil industrially in like the mid 1800s, right? We'd already developed a lot of technology, doesn't seem ridiculous to think we could have gotten from there to here without oil. And maybe we'd have developed biofuels sooner?

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