Ram Shortage, SSD shortage, CPU shortage, GPU shortage, diesel shortage, now motor oil shortage.......
Are we going to have shortage of everything now ......
Are we going to have shortage of everything now ......
It is not an "if". It is now inevitable.
He is very pro alternative sources of energy but he clearly explains nothing can replace petroleum right now. Petroleum is used to build everything. Gas for your car. Your clothes. Plastic bags. Our beloved computers. Everything uses petroleum one way or another.
We are doomed.
I’m just happy I’m too old to go through all the bad times that are coming.
It’s just that a lot of companies (and people) get very rich from it and they invest A LOT into making sure that petroleum alternatives are not viable.
Of course there are some things were petroleum cant be easily substituted but I would argue the vast majority of use cases doesnt require it.
Energy is probably the most important and there it’s laughable easy to replace.
Not really, not at this scale, or this price and convenience.
Most things you enjoy today are affordable because we have fossil fuels. The entire supply chain of every single product you can imagine is very dependent on fossil fuels. We're not even capable of making proper roads or tires without petroleum derivates, without these two alone nothing gets to you. Investigate a bit, you'll find petroleum and petroleum derivates a prerequisite of virtually everything.
Renewable energies look like a solved problem today with wind and solar, but it seems like everybody forgets that the entire supply chain to make them is 100% petrol dependant from mining raw materials to the final delivery. In a world without petrol these would be orders of magnitude more expensive, if even possible at all.
Not at this scale and price and convenience.
We can absolutely do so for higher prices. And with solar panels becoming more efficient, cheaper, and more ubiquitous with each passing year, we may find that a lot of those "higher prices" were really just "higher energy input costs", and we will be able to come very close to what we have now. (I don't know for sure—this isn't an area I keep abreast of.)
If everything gets 10-100x harder and more expensive to make I can guarantee you the world will become a very different place.
regardless, i agree, we aren't totally killing fossil fuels anytime soon.
on the other hand, we don't need to. A reduction in demand by 75% would be world changing, and looks a lot more plausible than no fossil fuels ever.
Seeing that we use about 2/3 of the total for transportation fuel it’s not like we need most of it to build the renewable infrastructure - that’s more like a drop in the bucket.
Most petroleum gets used to propel vehicles, to heat buildings, and to produce electricity - and it’s definitely not without alternative there
You don't need to be some kind of super genius to understand this, if you have not been sucked in to the populist left wing propaganda about petroleum. We can't even replace petroleum for energy right now, let alone all its other uses.
It's not just oil we'll have issues with either, lots of minerals could easily see shortages and rapidly increasing costs to extract over this century.
> We are doomed.
More propaganda. We don't need infinite economic growth, infinite population growth, or even continued quality of life growth. Nothing bad even happens when you have degrowth, all other life forms have periods of growth and degrowth. It's all crazy propaganda that people repeat we need to constantly keep boosting up population numbers.
A few generations ago nobody on earth ever saw a motor car for the entire history of humanity. Or electricity. Antibiotics. Synthetic fertilizers. Any kind of plastic.
Things will change, people will adapt, conflict and famine, etc. Much the same as the rest of human history. The people of the future might no lot be able to expect to be clothed, fed, housed, and entertained in exchange for sitting around an air-conditioned office eating a birthday cake before putting in their solid 2.5 hours of work for the day drawing up the next draft of policies around who can use which bathroom before scrolling tiktok for the rest of the work day. But I wouldn't call that "doomed".
In human history, when there has been a period of protracted degrowth something bad has very much happened - usually civilizational collapse or severe prolonged economic downturn.
> We don't need infinite economic growth, infinite population growth, or even continued quality of life growth
I agree on the first two, but I believe that an expectation of the third is foundational to the post-Enlightenment social order. It has waxed and waned, and there have obviously been incredibly dark periods, but we've usually returned to "things will be better in the future" as a setpoint.
I read "Degrowth" by Kohei Saito recently. I found it challenging (in that it challenged a lot of my preconceived notions), but also a fairly positive approach to implementing degrowth. Sadly, at least in the US, I think it is alien to the American mind and only has a hope of being implemented at the local level in sporadic places.
Bad things have caused degrowth, that doesn't refute what I said though. The Edo Period in Japan is said to be a canonical example of degrowth that was not catastrophic. Japan today has had GDP per capita pretty steady for the past 35 years and so far nothing horrific, just the hilarious wailing and gnashing of teeth from western "experts". So I think those are sufficient counter-examples.
> I agree on the first two, but I believe that an expectation of the third is foundational to the post-Enlightenment social order. It has waxed and waned, and there have obviously been incredibly dark periods, but we've usually returned to "things will be better in the future" as a setpoint.
1. Have we, really?
2. Various objective and subjective quality of life metrics have been going backwards in some western countries for a generation now.
3. What about it is it that you think is foundational to social order? What happens if we don't have it.?
In any case it's an unsustainable expectation that is going to have to change one way or another.
If we're going by feelings and anecdotes, my feeling is that people in general don't actually need that at all. They want some amount of fairness, freedom, self-determination, and the ability to personally get ahead. They don't need to be ahead of where their parents were at the same age, they want to be able to be ahead of where they were yesterday (at least in economic terms).
Now we'll be forced to go through all the same, and much more, in just a few years. And I can't imagine that even 5% of those arguing the statements above will recognize their role in all this.
We're about to realize what it means to have a globalized economy addicted to petrol
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/09/11/world/middlee...
Food production is also at risk