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Comment by randyrand | Hacker News Reader

>And yet, even if all that is true, oil is still a finite resource being consumed with ever increasing demand.

That can't be said for certain: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/05/making-renewabl/

But yes, I agree with you. If oil is for some reason impossible to produce synthetically then there will without question have to come a time when we need to switch to an alternative. I think that switch will happen naturally without the need for government intervention, though. Even without a synthetic alternative I think that switch will happen sooner rather than later.

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Oil can be produced synthetically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process

Though the FT process is quite bad from a CO2 emissions POV.

I don't think that biofuel counts as "oil" for the purposes of this discussion.

it's not a fossil fuel that gets dug up. It's a renewable, carbon-neutral storage of solar power, really.

Renewable possibly. Sustainable & carbon neutral, definitely not. https://www.google.com/search?q=is+biofuel+carbon+neutral

It's heavily subsidized, pushes food prices up, causes deforestation and requires more energy to produce than it produces.

It's a short term hack that exists because it fits in to the current energy systems, not a longterm solution. It certainly does constitute as 'oil' for the purposes of this discussion.

The problem is also that oil becomes more expensive along an exponential curve. We'd have to see ~4% per year efficiency increase in the entire economy, every single year.

That's not just finding more efficient systems. That's inventing them, engineering them, building them, replacing existing systems, and the ROI of the ENTIRE process (including the activity needed for said replacement) needs to be at least 4% of the size of the economy. Every year. Even the renewable technologies we have, like solar, fail this test because of their production energy costs.

When was the last year we saw 1% improvement in the economy ? Right.

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