And while that is a relief, it is still very troubling to think about the implications for our transportation infrastructure as a whole (where consumer vehicles represent a minority fraction.)
How will we power our ocean freighters, our freight trains, our 18-wheelers, and our high capacity airplanes without high energy-density hydrocarbons (or with prohibitively expensive hydrocarbons)?
I can imagine nuclear and electric solutions (hand-wavy or hypothetical) to some of these modes, but could they be implemented on a global scale in time?
It makes me wonder what our transportation infrastructure will look like 100 or 200 years from now.
-In what non-obvious ways will we look backwards to people of the future?
-Will these people envy how cheaply we moved goods across the globe?
-Will they laugh at how expensive it was to move things across the globe?
-Will they even have the luxury of thinking about these things?