In case there weren't enough energy worries...

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

HSBC forecasts oil could 'run out' in under 50 years.

There could be less than 49 years of oil supplies left, even if demand were to remain flat according to HSBC’s senior global economist Karen Ward.
"Energy resources are scarce," Ward said in a research note. "Even if demand doesn’t increase, there could be as little as 49 years of oil left."

"Gas is less of a constraint, but transporting it and using it to meet transport demand is a major issue," she said. "Coal is the most abundant with 176 years left, but this is the worst carbon culprit."

If supplies were not constrained, the world would see a 110 percent jump in demand by 2050, equivalent to 190 million barrels a day, to fuel growth in the emerging world, Ward said.

But unless someone finds major new reserves this will not be possible and other sources of energy will need to be found.

"Energy security – defined in this instance as domestic energy production per head of population – will be an increasing concern," she said. "Diversifying to natural gas to ease the pressure on the oil market won’t overcome it since its supply is as geographically dense as oil."

Ward said she believes the most "energy insecure" regions are Europe, Latin America and India and predicts Europe in particular will find its energy situation getting worse.

"Europe is the big loser with many countries falling down or out of the league table of economic size," she said. "They could be losing their influence on the world stage just at the time when they are most vulnerable."

No Fast Cars

The threat of global warming is not going away and its impact will be most keenly felt in the developing world, HSBC said.

"The ‘solution’ requires greater energy efficiency and a switch in the mix of energy as well as using ‘carbon capture’ technology to limit the damage of fossil fuel use," Ward said.

"We have become terribly complacent in the way in which we use energy," she added. "The lowest hanging fruit is in the transport sector. Smaller, more efficient cars will get you from A to B, just not as quickly."

As the Japanese authorities work around the clock to avoid a nuclear disaster there is a risk that nuclear power generation will see investment cut back at a time when it was expected to play a far bigger role.

"If Fukushima results in a two-decade freeze on plans, as we saw following the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, then renewable energy will have to play an even larger role, or efficiency improvements would have to accelerate further," Ward said. "A reduced role for nuclear energy would make meeting carbon limits even more challenging."

"Government foresight on a scale not seen for 40 years will be needed to chart the route for the next 40 – at a time when the public sector in the OECD has perhaps the least capacity in decades to make strategic investments in new infrastructure."

Bear in mind that the story doesn't define exactly what HSBC means by "out of oil in fifty years," though I suspect that what they mean is that there's fifty forty-nine years of proven, recoverable, reserves at current rates of production.

Just another thing to worry about, with the situation at Fukushima causing national governments to delay the expansion of nuclear power.

[Iroscato]

The energy crisis will, I fear, be a perfect showcase of mankind's unwillingness to act until it's pretty much too late. Once oil goes, the thing we like to pretend is a civilisation goes down like a sack of shit. The Fukushima crisis has created more bad press for nuclear power (literally our only viable alternative) than it can recover from in time, with countries all over the place panicking and throttling back on nuclear investment.

Oil, the thing the 21st century absolutely relies on, is going to run out in my lifetime. That's a terrifying thought, and it's one of the many reasons I'm never bringing kids into this troubled world.

[Simon_Jester]

I think you're overstating the speed with which the transition is going to happen. We're not going to be running through our oil in a hurry and then suddenly hit the bottom of the metaphorical milkshake. What's going to happen is a decreasing number of new finds, a narrowing margin of proven oil reserves not yet tapped, and an increasing price of extracting what oil is left. There will still be oil in the world in 2100, but it will no longer be economical to pump it out of the ground and set it on fire by the gallon in order to get to Chuck E. Cheese.

This process is going to take decades, and the world's major economies will have quite a bit of time to adjust. If anything, the impact is likely to be worse in developing economies, where larger populations are so totally dependent on a ready supply of cheap calories- which in turn depends on petrochemical-fueled farming.

It's not like we're going to go from "normal one year" to "Mad Max the next year." Nor is it like there aren't alternatives: they're more expensive and less efficient, but the gap isn't bigger than what our civilization has a margin of error for. You'd be surprised how big a chunk of per capita GDP a healthy modern economy could spend on energy and still have the resources

So maybe it'll turn out that in 2050 we won't have so many power-hungry iPhones* and disposable plastic containers as we'd like, and maybe energy prices will be high enough that people have to crowd tighter together into cities, but that doesn't mean Mad Max or Soylent Green.

*Hint: don't look at the power your smart phone consumes directly. Look at the power demands it places on the wireless transmitters.

[Guardsman Bass]

It's not like we're going to go from "normal one year" to "Mad Max the next year." Nor is it like there aren't alternatives: they're more expensive and less efficient, but the gap isn't bigger than what our civilization has a margin of error for. You'd be surprised how big a chunk of per capita GDP a healthy modern economy could spend on energy and still have the resources

Natural Gas strikes me as one obvious one, since there are already natural gas-powered cars that aren't totally uneconomical (the main issue would be getting all the natural gas stations set up over time). But there are realistically a number of options, ranging from natural gas cars to simply much more efficient gasoline ones, that can mitigate issues with oil (the majority of oil use in the US is for the transportation sector).

So maybe it'll turn out that in 2050 we won't have so many power-hungry iPhones* and disposable plastic containers as we'd like, and maybe energy prices will be high enough that people have to crowd tighter together into cities, but that doesn't mean Mad Max or Soylent Green.

That's only if there's some factor of production or distribution bottleneck that is expensive enough to constrict their use. Just generating electricity is fairly cheap and easy, depending on how much you care about the ecology in your country and the climate worldwide.

[K. A. Pital]

I think you're overstating the speed with which the transition is going to happen.

I don't think the transition will be swift, but the energy crisis will cause a political disturbance undoubtedly, especially in less wealthy nations. Which, in case of Russia for example, means a definite "no to kids" and "yes to guns".

The speed matters not. Under pervasive oligarchy, incomes remain flat and a mild form of opression can persist for decades (see Egypt). When it finally breaks down, an impoverished nation with little industry and scarce resources is left to deal with their own problems.

This process is going to take decades, and the world's major economies will have quite a bit of time to adjust

The process is already underway, actually, and all I've seen as to "adjustment" efforts in the First World are either irrelevant pathetic actions (like the harmful Earth Hour for example) or stuff that is relevant (changing from incandecent bulbs to something else), but which still doesn't change the big picture. Call me a skeptic, but I do not see an easy way out of the energy crisis. With the Bundeswehr study, I expect more than a few governments to collapse.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

The energy crisis will, I fear, be a perfect showcase of mankind's unwillingness to act until it's pretty much too late. Once oil goes, the thing we like to pretend is a civilisation goes down like a sack of shit. The Fukushima crisis has created more bad press for nuclear power (literally our only viable alternative) than it can recover from in time, with countries all over the place panicking and throttling back on nuclear investment.

Oil, the thing the 21st century absolutely relies on, is going to run out in my lifetime. That's a terrifying thought, and it's one of the many reasons I'm never bringing kids into this troubled world.

One shouldn't think of the year 2060 as being the one where we magically transform from civilized society to shooting each other in the face over the last can of chicken noodle soup in the burnt-out wreckage of the last Wal-Mart. The effects won't be evenly distributed. The developing countries will feel the effects of oil market price rises and volatility much more severely than someone in the First World (having less money to spend on energy and infrastructure, and whose population is heavily reliant on basic staples to stay fed. Huge swings in crop prices don't affect a can of chicken soup (whose raw ingredients make up little of the final price) as much as they do a raw bag of rice, for example.) Countries with huge natural gas, coal, or other readily-tapped energy reserves will feel the pinch much less; though everyone is going to feel it when they burn more natural gas and coal to make up for dwindling oil supplies while trying to manufacture green energy supplies and build more nuclear powerplants.

[Tribun]

It's actually ridiculous to say that once oil runs out, we're back in the stone age. Even today there are already technologies that can make oil obsolete in some sectors, while it's more difficult to subtitute in others.

For example, there are already Diesel engines that can run on normal Diesel fuel and Diesel fuel that is made from plants. While there are still some problems to solve, that is already one alternative besides other things like electric cars. Also general power generation is possible with regenerative ressources (wind, solar, etc...). The one sector where I see oil still being important is the chemical industry - which ironically enough currently uses the least of the daily oil consumption.

So the world won't go belly-up. The real problems are greedy bastards who don't want a changeover because it endagers their profit line.

[K. A. Pital]

Biofuel is the road to destruction in the Third World, because the crop areas are a finite resource. Taking area from food crops for biofuel will lead to a food price spike. Hunger, riots and civil disturbances will follow.

Wind and solar are terribly inefficient as far as energy production goes.

[Big Phil]

The energy crisis will, I fear, be a perfect showcase of mankind's unwillingness to act until it's pretty much too late. Once oil goes, the thing we like to pretend is a civilisation goes down like a sack of shit. The Fukushima crisis has created more bad press for nuclear power (literally our only viable alternative) than it can recover from in time, with countries all over the place panicking and throttling back on nuclear investment.

This same gloom and doom attitude pervaded the late 19th century, with fears of peak coal reverting civilization to 18th century primitiveness. Given that people are already (slowly) starting to become aware of the need to reduce our reliance on oil, I have a hard time believing that in 50 years we'll still be guzzling oil like we're doing today.

Oil, the thing the 21st century absolutely relies on, is going to run out in my lifetime. That's a terrifying thought, and it's one of the many reasons I'm never bringing kids into this troubled world.

Right, and that has nothing to do with the fact that no woman will let you touch her...

[aerius]

It's not like we're going to go from "normal one year" to "Mad Max the next year." Nor is it like there aren't alternatives: they're more expensive and less efficient, but the gap isn't bigger than what our civilization has a margin of error for. You'd be surprised how big a chunk of per capita GDP a healthy modern economy could spend on energy and still have the resources

Natural Gas strikes me as one obvious one, since there are already natural gas-powered cars that aren't totally uneconomical (the main issue would be getting all the natural gas stations set up over time).

Lots of people think it is, but it isn't. There's a bit under 300 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves in the US, each cubic foot has about 1000 BTU in energy. Gasoline is about 115,000 BTU per gallon and the US burns about 380 million gallons a day. Diesel is 130,000 BTU per gallon and around 170 million gallons goes up in smoke every day. Once you work out the energy equivalences for natural gas & liquid fuels and crunch the numbers you'll find that the reserves aren't going to last very long if we start burning them for transportion. Less than 20 years if you're going to run the nation's cars on the stuff, do cars, trucks, and heating and it's about 10 years. Then add in all the stuff we already use natural gas for and it's something like 8 years tops.

As for renewables, yeah, good luck. Current global energy consumption is something like 400 quads (quadrillion BTUs) a year. Bruce NGS, the 2nd largest nuke plant in the world produces around 0.16 quads a year when all 8 reactors are running at 100%. Have fun replacing that with renewables, you'll need windmills and solar panels as far as the eye can see.

As far as I'm concerned it's nukes or bust. Nuclear with full reprocessing running a thorium-uranium cycle is the only long term solution to our energy needs unless we're willing to accept a much different lifestyle. We have the technology, we can just shove the thorium fuel into our existing CANDU plants & reprocess, we don't even have to build new reactor designs. But we don't do it.

[Simon_Jester]

This same gloom and doom attitude pervaded the late 19th century, with fears of peak coal reverting civilization to 18th century primitiveness. Given that people are already (slowly) starting to become aware of the need to reduce our reliance on oil, I have a hard time believing that in 50 years we'll still be guzzling oil like we're doing today.

We won't have a choice.

Unlike 1890, we're in a pretty good position to say that no drastically new sources of cheap energy are going to be discovered in the near future. Unless someone invents a perpetual motion machine or cold-fusion power plant in their backyard (which is not likely and certainly can't be counted on for debating purposes), energy will get more expensive, and that will affect consumption. In the developed world, conspicuous consumption of mass-marketed goods will contract, because money now spent on iPhones will instead be spent on electricity drawn at greater expense from wind turbines. In the Third World, we will see increasing crop shortages and a lack of foreign food aid to make up for the lack, and yes there will be economic and political chaos as a result.

The average citizen's lifestyle will change, and change considerably. But regardless of moaning and groaning by those unable to imagine civilized existence as working any way other than however it works this minute (I include Spiro in this, but not Stas), life is going to go on, on terms that most of the people living it will be fairly satisfied with.

Biofuel is the road to destruction in the Third World, because the crop areas are a finite resource. Taking area from food crops for biofuel will lead to a food price spike. Hunger, riots and civil disturbances will follow.

Wind and solar are terribly inefficient as far as energy production goes.

Yes, and yes.

Energy is going to become increasingly expensive through the 21st century. This will have a lot of bad consequences: contraction of lifestyles in the fully-developed world, political disruptions in the somewhat-developed world, and disaster in the undeveloped world.

But in countries that don't face an overpopulation problem over and above the growing energy crisis, this is not a problem great enough to justify melodramatic moaning about "it's unconscionable to bring children into the world, for these are the end times!" Peak oil is not Ragnarok.

Was it unconscionable (in hindsight) to have children in 1900? Those kids were going to have to live through two world wars, a major global economic collapse, and the spectacle of nuclear annihilation in their old age. And yet life went on, and most of the people born in 1900 would not, on balance, prefer to have never existed.

Hell, was it unconscionable to have children during the fucking Dark Ages? When infant mortality was 10-20%, when random barbarian warlords kept sacking people's villages, when the average human being could look forward to nothing but a lifetime of toil at subsistence agriculture, ending in death by plague or wound infection or some other cause of death we would now consider easily preventable?

Compared to what the 21st century holds for the average citizen of a developed nation, that was a horrible prospect... and yet it's what the majority of humanity throughout the history of the species lived with. Life went on, and only a handful of mentally unstable fanatics looked at it and decided that it was the End of the World and that having children would be wronging them.

[Broomstick]

I'm absolutely convinced a solution will be found... but there is no guarantee we'll like that solution, or that the transition will be either peaceful or comfortable.

After all, one "solution" is to simply kill off 90% of the human population, after which there will be plenty of resources to go around - but who the hell would want to endure such a winnowing of the population

[Simon_Jester]

Yes. And yet once again, people have lived through periods of similar upheaval in the past and, on balance, been happy to do so.

Reading it in a history book, it's going to seem like an unpleasant era- but so did the early 20th century, where all we ever hear about were the wars and depressions. That doesn't mean that normal people living through those times didn't find room for happiness.

[Iroscato]

The energy crisis will, I fear, be a perfect showcase of mankind's unwillingness to act until it's pretty much too late. Once oil goes, the thing we like to pretend is a civilisation goes down like a sack of shit. The Fukushima crisis has created more bad press for nuclear power (literally our only viable alternative) than it can recover from in time, with countries all over the place panicking and throttling back on nuclear investment.

This same gloom and doom attitude pervaded the late 19th century, with fears of peak coal reverting civilization to 18th century primitiveness. Given that people are already (slowly) starting to become aware of the need to reduce our reliance on oil, I have a hard time believing that in 50 years we'll still be guzzling oil like we're doing today.

Oil, the thing the 21st century absolutely relies on, is going to run out in my lifetime. That's a terrifying thought, and it's one of the many reasons I'm never bringing kids into this troubled world.

Right, and that has nothing to do with the fact that no woman will let you touch her...

That last line really hurt. Honest.

And besides, it's good to be pessimistic, expect the worst, then you'll never be disappointed . The 'green movement' has run out of momentum IMO, corporations are simply too greedy and oil-dependant to stop. Our reserves are at our lowest ever, yet our consumption is at its highest ever.

I just think we'll stop too late...

Edit- after looking at the other posts after mine, maybe I was a little short-sighted in my views. Thanks for giving me the forum equivalent of a wake-up slap. I just get depressed about the world sometimes, and I take on the attitude of a crusty old man.

[Guardsman Bass]

Once you work out the energy equivalences for natural gas & liquid fuels and crunch the numbers you'll find that the reserves aren't going to last very long if we start burning them for transportion. Less than 20 years if you're going to run the nation's cars on the stuff, do cars, trucks, and heating and it's about 10 years. Then add in all the stuff we already use natural gas for and it's something like 8 years tops.

Why are you making the assumption that the US will only burn its own reserves of natural gas? There's already an international market for natural gas, even if it's much more economical to send it by pipeline than by ship.

As for renewables, yeah, good luck. Current global energy consumption is something like 400 quads (quadrillion BTUs) a year. Bruce NGS, the 2nd largest nuke plant in the world produces around 0.16 quads a year when all 8 reactors are running at 100%. Have fun replacing that with renewables, you'll need windmills and solar panels as far as the eye can see.

I was talking about the transportation sector, but I'll bite. I didn't say anything about shifting the entire world over to renewable energy, because I suspect that coal will still provide most of our electrical power well into the 21st century (barring a revolution in solar power, unrealistically cheap fusion power, or more aggressive nuclear power). That's why I qualified my comment with a remark that it really depends on how much you care about climate and ecological damage.

Back to the transportation sector, natural gas does not need to be the only source of replacement for increasingly expensive gasoline- and diesel-fueled cars. There are full electrical cars, fuel cell cars (if we pay for the infrastructure for them), among other alternatives, and they are all very possible over the gradual time frame of oil depletion that we will likely be facing (and as others have pointed out).

In the developed world, conspicuous consumption of mass-marketed goods will contract, because money now spent on iPhones will instead be spent on electricity drawn at greater expense from wind turbines.

That really depends on whether or not society takes the easy road and relies on coal (which will keep the electricity relatively cheap), or tries to go for more climatically and ecologically friendly energy sources at higher energy costs. I'm betting on the former, particularly in the Developing World.

As for conspicuous consumption in general, that will change simply because so much of the population will be older, with the median age increasing every year due to the world-wide demographic transition.

[Nephtys]

Doom-de-doom de derpity doom?

Seriously people. This is probably the absolute best era of human existence to ever hit the earth, if your biggest fears are a vague, abstract assumption that in 50 years, the quality of life may go down because of energy shortfalls. We're not at risk of horrific global war, the vast majority of killer epidemics are under control, people are healthier and happier than ever, etc.

Anyway, solutions will be found. If anything's true in human history, it's that even with stupidity rampant, there's that minority that actually drives things forward that will do what needs to be done. Oil is not a requirement of civilization, it's just easy and cheap. Nuclear plants WILL be built, the outcry of ignorant masses be damned. Because in the end, they don't really make the decisions.

[aerius]

Why are you making the assumption that the US will only burn its own reserves of natural gas? There's already an international market for natural gas, even if it's much more economical to send it by pipeline than by ship.

If we use the global reserves & consumption figures we get about 60 years worth at current rates. If you want to replace oil, punch in the energy equivalence for the amount of oil you plan to replace and work it back into the reserves numbers.

Back to the transportation sector, natural gas does not need to be the only source of replacement for increasingly expensive gasoline- and diesel-fueled cars. There are full electrical cars, fuel cell cars (if we pay for the infrastructure for them), among other alternatives, and they are all very possible over the gradual time frame of oil depletion that we will likely be facing (and as others have pointed out).

Fun fact, fuel cell cars will actually consume twice as much energy as current gasoline & diesel cars Electrical cars are better, but you'll still need 50-75 new nuke plants to supply the juice and a heavily upgraded electrical grid. When was the last time we built a new nuke plant or upgraded the electrical grid? As much as I'd like to see a nuke plant a month program, I seriously doubt it'll happen in my lifetime.

[Pelranius]

I don't think the transition will be swift, but the energy crisis will cause a political disturbance undoubtedly, especially in less wealthy nations. Which, in case of Russia for example, means a definite "no to kids" and "yes to guns".

I think you're being a little pessimistic there Stas. Even with oligarchical corruption, Russia's natural resources and nuclear power industry should allow it to ride out the energy crisis much better, than say, Ethiopia or Bangladesh (with all due respect to our Bangladeshi and Ethiopian friends).

[Simon_Jester]

And besides, it's good to be pessimistic, expect the worst, then you'll never be disappointed . The 'green movement' has run out of momentum IMO, corporations are simply too greedy and oil-dependant to stop. Our reserves are at our lowest ever, yet our consumption is at its highest ever.

I just think we'll stop too late...

Edit- after looking at the other posts after mine, maybe I was a little short-sighted in my views. Thanks for giving me the forum equivalent of a wake-up slap. I just get depressed about the world sometimes, and I take on the attitude of a crusty old man.

What a lot of people miss about peak oil is that 'gradual process' thing: that we don't go from "normal" to "post-apocalyptic nightmare" in a period of days or months. There is a lot that industrial economies can do to adapt to changing conditions over a period of a few years, if problems become urgent enough. We tend to underestimate just what our civilizations are capable of because they've done so little in the way of grand projects lately, but the physical capability is still there.

I expect, with reasonable confidence, that the gap between "oil becomes expensive enough that current economic model starts to fray" and "oil becomes so expensive that current economic model cannot function at all" will take many years to cross.

Arguably we're already into the first part of that- and you do see at least limited energy-consciousness taking hold. Corporate executives may be greedy and short-sighted, but they aren't totally stupid, and "oil gets more expensive every year" is the sort of argument they're well-equipped to understand because it comes with a dollar sign attached.

The real potential for disaster, as everyone's saying, is among Third World societies that are even more thoroughly mismanaged than the First World economies, and where the economic margin of error is thinner- where there's less surplus production/consumption that can be diverted to producing and consuming the means of survival in an expensive-energy world.

[Psychic_Sandwich]

Biofuel is the road to destruction in the Third World, because the crop areas are a finite resource. Taking area from food crops for biofuel will lead to a food price spike. Hunger, riots and civil disturbances will follow.

Wind and solar are terribly inefficient as far as energy production goes.

Depending on your biofuel tech, that's not necessarily true. It depends on whether you're converting the 'useful' part of the plant into fuel (like corn to ethanol), or whether you can convert cellulose to petrochemicals. If you can do that, then you can use all the wheat to make bread, and the otherwise useless chaff as the raw materials for a petrochemical industry. There are already GM bacteria that can convert cellulose to what is effectively crude oil; the problem now is scaling them up to an industrial level, which so far as I'm aware has not yet been done. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's impossible, though. Best of all, it's carbon neutral or better, given that all the carbon in plant cellulose comes from the atmosphere, and you're not going to get 100% efficient conversion of cellulose to petrochem.

[Tribun]

I don't know which crowd annoys me more: "Ohmagod, we're going back to the stone age!" or "Ohmagod, nuclear is our ONLY rescue." The first is clear, why, since it's so utter moronic that I don't need to explain. The second actually is annoying because they they tend to completely ignore or dismiss the already existing alternatives for power generation in favor of their nuclear buddy, and act as if the problems that come with this kind of power generation are negliable.

I know that some propably are now pissed that I insulted their darling, but I don't care.

Well, now that I've let off that, Psychic_Sandwich made a good point in that the whole fuel form plants issue is far more complex than just saying that it automatically lets the third world starve. It's a field of science that yet has to come to full maturity.

And yeah, the whole peak oil thing has grown into a huge scare story over time. Accoding to what the Club of Rome spouted in the late 70's , we should already be back in the stone age, considering how agressively they marketed that oil would've run out by now. Well ,that obviously didn't happen. Of course the reserves ARE limited and there will be a time when it will be in shorter supply than it is now. However, it won't be a sudden apocalypse.

I don't know the exact numbers. How much of the oil is simply used for transportation (especially cars)? I know it propably is the biggest percentage, but I have no numbers.

[Guardsman Bass]

I don't know which crowd annoys me more: "Ohmagod, we're going back to the stone age!" or "Ohmagod, nuclear is our ONLY rescue." The first is clear, why, since it's so utter moronic that I don't need to explain. The second actually is annoying because they they tend to completely ignore or dismiss the already existing alternatives for power generation in favor of their nuclear buddy, and act as if the problems that come with this kind of power generation are negliable.

Nobody is dismissing solar or wind (I personally favor research and investment in both). But short of some amazing breakthroughs in technology and cost (and cost for solar panels is going down), they won't be implemented as a truly significant fraction of global energy supply outside of a handful of areas until well into the second half of the 21st century.

Particularly since both have their own implementation issues (although not as severe as the issues Nuclear power has). Both have run into NIMBYism and litigation regarding environmental impact.

That said, I don't think nuclear will save us. Odds are we'll just end up burning a lot of coal and natural gas.

I know that some propably are now pissed that I insulted their darling, but I don't care.

Yes, we've all heard about your irrational German paranoia regarding nuclear power. Several times before, in fact.

How much of the oil is simply used for transportation (especially cars)? I know it propably is the biggest percentage, but I have no numbers.

It depends on the country. In the US, 72% of petroleum consumed is in the Transportation Sector.

[Tribun]

I actually can't stand both sides. Most often it's just two extreme positions. Either nuclear is the devil, or nuclear is the only hope. I'm just plain anoyed by now.

Interesting numbers, they'll probably in a similar range for other industrialised countries. That just makes it plain obvious that if a solution to the transportation problem is found, it would reduce oil consumption significantly, thus freeing it for more important things like plastic production.

[Zaune]

Depending on your biofuel tech, that's not necessarily true. It depends on whether you're converting the 'useful' part of the plant into fuel (like corn to ethanol), or whether you can convert cellulose to petrochemicals. If you can do that, then you can use all the wheat to make bread, and the otherwise useless chaff as the raw materials for a petrochemical industry. There are already GM bacteria that can convert cellulose to what is effectively crude oil; the problem now is scaling them up to an industrial level, which so far as I'm aware has not yet been done. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's impossible, though. Best of all, it's carbon neutral or better, given that all the carbon in plant cellulose comes from the atmosphere, and you're not going to get 100% efficient conversion of cellulose to petrochem.

Actually, even the kind of biofuel tech that uses the edible parts of the plant could have their place. Think what the people of a farming village in rural Africa could do with a biofuel plant just big enough to provide fuel for a tractor, a couple of trucks and a pump for irrigation, maybe a small generator.

[Broomstick]

Yes. And yet once again, people have lived through periods of similar upheaval in the past and, on balance, been happy to do so.

"Happy to survive" is different than "Happy to see most of the people I know die".

Of course those who survive are usually happy to still be alive... but it sucks for those who don't make it, and even if you're happy to survive it doesn't mean you're feeling good about losing so many people you care for.