Mickblog

I saw Mark’s entry about this and I must voice my concern. The sentiment of certain “experts” is that we are going to run out of oil in 2025 or so and then we’re going to “go back to the Stone Age”.

I don’t share their pessimism. Here’s why.

While I won’t argue the amount of oil we have left, I can say with confidence that we’re not going to all suddenly go to our respective local petrol stations one day and find big “SOLD OUT” signs on all the pumps. What’s going to happen is petrol prices are going to increase between now and then, like it already is, until nobody can afford it.

This is important because when petrol does start to become expensive, the free market will kick in and work properly to come up with alternatives for transport (and other things) for us. In about the time we have, the Internet was turned from something localised to the defense industry and a few universities into a global network that everyone has already gotten bored of.

It’s already happening - we’re seeing prototype hybrid, electric, hydrogen and biofuel cars already. It’s just that they’re not being mass produced or heavily developed yet because nobody really wants them yet.

The view of these “experts” seems to be that none of these alternatives are viable, for one reason or another. I’ll avoid getting into the details for now and just say that their views tend to ignore current and future developments in the different technologies. I’ve read into some of the stuff that’s being developed, and some of it is pretty impressive and encouraging. Yet the doomsayers blurt out things like “electric cars use batteries and batteries suck”, “hyrdogen can explode”, etc etc. and seem convinced that this closes their argument.

Now when petrol starts to become properly expensive, entrepreneurs will start putting some serious money into developing these alternatives, and things will start moving.

Yes, there are other things to consider, i.e. oil isn’t used just for petrol - it’s used for cleaning agents, plastics etc. But the same free market rules apply. I imagine we will figure out a way to synthesize most of these other materials, if we haven’t already.

So yeah, there will be some friction while we figure out how to live without oil. But it won’t be with a new Stone Age or Armageddon.

For those who occasionally check up on my blog (both of you) you might have noticed that it was gone for a while.

The server holding my blog self-destructed. Which was kind of annoying, since the same server also received my mail, mail for about 5 other people, contained 2 CVS repositories, a dozen web sites, and gigs of precious pr0n and warez.

How did this all happen? I’m not sure but I think it can be blamed on XFS. Silly me, not heeding the warnings.

It’s mostly all still there but there were some casualties. Files got scattered all over the place in lost+found, and some disappeared altogether. The CVS repositories were both damaged, and lots of system files were too. Essentially it meant rebuilding the server from scratch.

This all happened while my dad was over for a few days whlie he helped me look for a car. So I had to coordinate that with making sure nobody lost their mail. And it all started while I was on 1 hour of sleep. Great fun.

I’ve recovered everything cept for a bit of CVS history and a couple of other bits and pieces. There’s still some stuff to go though. If you see something missing or broken let me know.