Reply #16: The word "addicted" is way overused...

[Ozymanithrax]

Oil is not an addiction. Neither is it like water or air. Humans lived just fine in civilizations that did not depend on the hyper utilization of a single, cheap resource. Water and air are physiological needs. Oil is a convenience.

The computer we use to communicate on this board would simply not exist without oil. It is not just in the paint, circuit boards, insulation, those are just layers of use.

The green revolution of the 60's allows humanity to grow enough food to exceed the carrying capacity of the planet. That is why all other species that compete with us for food and resources are being stuffed and preserved as "specimens of extinct organisms." Because of oil based fertilizers, and ships to carry oil based fertilizers to farmers, and farm equipment to spread oil based fertilizers, and other farm equipment to plant, tend, and sow food crops, we are both literally and symbolically eating oil.

Without oil, crop yields would plummet to, at minimum, the level we enjoyed in the 1930's and 1940's (2.3 billion people suffering from regular malnutrition). The food for the rest of us could not be grown. Moving to local suppliers of food won't work because the all require the same intense use of oil. Subsistence farming depends on the climate, soil conditions, agricultural practices and the crop grown, and it takes from half an acre to 10 acres depending on those conditions. It is labor intensive and produces no surplus. Shortages are common do to variable climate. We are not going to feed 5 billion people by subsistence farming.

So oil isn't an addiction, it is a requirement of our civilization, the first such civilization ever to spread across the entire surface of the earth. As a civilization, we will rise and fall with it's relative abundance. As oil becomes more difficult to obtain, and the ecological degradation due to its use spreads, our civilization will be wracked by crises until it collapses (See Mayans, Easter Island, Bronze Age Civilization, and others) or a new source of the crude stuff is found. Tinkering around the edges will not change the outcome.