Are you sure? It seems you are banking on an unlimited supply of oil, what if there isn't? What then? Some experts also believe we have gone past peak oil.
The question is NOT meaningless if you have children and grandchildren who will be affected by our over-consumption today. The Sun:your comparison to a timescale of billions of years is irrelevant.
If your argument is that everything will die in the end then there really is no point in debating anything is there? Why bother doing anything? We will just be dead whatever happens.
I wasn't being pessimistic, just showing you that your question of the finite supply of oil is meaningless. You need to phrase your questions better because it will force you to understand the problem more accurately.
What would you say, if you could go back 120 years, and hear the people complaining that there weren't enough horses for all the people? That the big cities were being overrun with the large animals, and their waste was making living there a nightmare. What about the people who worried that whale blubber was going to run out, so they would no longer be able to work at night?
These people didn't know about automobiles, or oil. They were foolishly worried about the eternal demands of the *present*, when that has never been an indicator of the demands of the *future*. You are making the same mistake.
Another thing to think about: Stuff isn't going to just run out one day. You won't wake up to a headline that we have run out of copper, or oil. Think about how these things are produced. There are hundreds of miners and drillers and thousands and thousands of sources. We keep turning up new ones as old ones run out. The process of running completely out of something will be gradual, and market forces will come into play.
Think about how it would work: The top 5 copper mines in the world are played out. No replacement is found. What happens? First, the price of copper follows supply and demand, and is so expensive, that replacement materials are found to offset the demand. Also, just as is happening now, the price for old copper keeps rising, so the supply is staunched by recyclers (a big industry right now). Eventually, rather than running out, the copper supply will be so tight that only essential uses will be able to afford it. It won't go away, but due to economic pressure, other things will take its place.
For instance, the biggest use of copper right now is for wiring. The first devices that send electricity over a small distance, wirelessly, have now been created. In 100 years, it may be that all electricity is beamed wirelessly throughout businesses and homes. The technology seems feasible.
Most oil use could be replaced by battery-operated vehicles that are recharged off the grid. A grid which uses nuclear power, which is much cleaner and more abundant than current power production. Perhaps solar cells will continue to advance, and we can just use solar power for most uses. This seems certainly the way things are progressing right now.
Think outside the box, friend. The way we use resources today is not going to last. It never has. And the scare-tactics that you are falling for have always been wrong, over and over and over again for 2,000 years that I am aware of.
So, again... please come with some proof for your dire fears, instead of the same rhetoric that anti-consumerists have been spouting for 40 years. You guys have been on the wrong side of history too often to think that you have credibility to burn here.
