Why We Are Running Out of Fossil Fuels
There has been a lot of talk in recent years about the damager of running out of fossil fuels. Just how soon this is likely to happen is open to some debate but we do that sooner or later it will happen. The question that has to be asked is why and can anything be done about it?
The reason that we are running out of fossil fuels is pretty obviously that we are using too much. There are a lot of reasons for this but it mainly comes down to our unwillingness to reduce the amount that we use. The truth is that a lot of the fuel that gets used is wasted on things like inefficient gas guzzling vehicles that are far bigger than are necessary. Despite the fact that we know that running out of fossil fuels is a danger there has been remarkably little effort put into reducing the amount that we use.
Of course even if we do reduce the amount of fossil fuels that we use we will still eventually run out of them, it will just be further down the road. The reason for this is that the supply is limited and new fossil fuels will take hundreds of millions of years to develop. That means that no matter what we do sooner or later we are going to run out. This is why it is so critical that we find alternatives that we can use instead, at some point we are going to need them.
One of the other reasons that we are running out of fossil fuels is that there is an increase in demand as more and more countries become industrialized. This is especially true of China where there is a very large population which is now demanding the same standard of living as exists in the west. This has greatly increased the demand for fossil fuels as they are necessary both to create the economic development in these countries but also because of the demands that the newly affluent have. If every family in China ends up owning a car we are going to run out of fuel very quickly.
A big part of the problem with running out of fossil fuels is that there is not nearly enough effort being put into finding alternatives. Certainly there has been some effort in this regard but it always runs up against the fact that changing to use the new fuel would cost more than continuing to use fossil fuels. Obviously if we continue to go the way that we are the price of fossil fuels will rise to the point where it does make financial sense to change. The danger however is that we will leave it so late that we won't have enough time to make the change to alternative fuel sources.