[quote=Ren]Oil isn’t an issue. In fact, if we do run out of it, it will be at a time when it doesn’t matter. There will be no energy deficit. Hundreds of companies are pouring Billions of dollars into alternative energy and materials for everything from cars to home heating to tupperware. If you can build any substance molecule by molecule, power an engine with pure water, and store large amounts of sun/wind-produced electrical energy for years, where is the need for oil?[/quote]

I think the entire concern about oil is overblown….To bring about change, it needs to be consumer pushed. If if companies create viable altenatives, consumers aren’t going to adopt it unless it

1) at least has identical performance to the existing thing
2) it costs the same or less.

So either

1) companies need to figure out how to make these altenative “green” things as cheap as non-green and perform as well

…or
…
2) the cost of non-green things need to dramatically go up…

Companies have the ability to create 60mpg cars right now if they wanted to. Put a 2 cylinder engine, that cant go faster than 60mph, and remove a bunch of safety equipment. BUT, consumers would not buy it in the majority anyway. So what the company ends up doing is expending a bunch of resources producing “green” stuff that people don’t buy/use.

Now, I bet if all the sudden gas prices are $5-10/gallon, well then consumers will be demanding for alternative fuel products in the majority. So if we run out of gas. Great, at that point it will be prohibitively expensive, so that alternative fuels would be a viable solution at that time.

(Polution is another subject, but that’s not the point of this thread)