

The World Will Never Run Out Of Oil - jkuria
http://news.yahoo.com/world-never-run-oil-might-price-tank-201456256.html

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saulrh
This article is _wrong_.

    
    
      As oil becomes scarce, consumers will necessarily turn to
      an alternative before the supply runs out.

When something has become so scarce that it is necessary for everybody to turn
to an alternative, you've run out of it. Yes, the world will always have oil,
but it will gradually become so expensive that you can't buy it for any
reasonable amount of money. We'll run out of oil in the same way that we've
run out of bottles of wine from the 1600's: some will exist, but nobody can do
anything with it because it's so rare and hard to get.

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peteretep
This article is /right/.

We won't wake up one day and be all "oh shit we ran out of oil". These things
work on a gradient, yo.

As the market prices in upcoming oil scarcity, so prices will initially rise.
The price of oil today prices in future scarcity. As the price gradually
increases, other alternatives start to come online from a financial viability
perspective. As more money is spent on those alternatives, so economies of
scale start to kick on, so new R&D resource is spent on alternatives, so
governments jumpy about energy security subsidize, etc.

If you want a natural resource to get all paranoid about, in ~20 years, South
East Asia will have a 300m person gender imbalance - there will be 300m men
who can't find a wife, can't start a family, can't settle down, and can't get
laid. I wanna see how the market solves /that/ one.

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vamsee
About the gender imbalance, it's easy - dowry is still very prevalent in India
and other parts of Asia. Which is what skews the numbers in favor of men
(people abort female babies on a regular basis to avoid paying dowry when they
grow up). When people realize there aren't that many females to go around, the
dowry concept will reverse, it will be men paying to get married. Then the
economic incentives will reverse, and the ratios will balance. That's how the
market solves it. Hopefully by then rising prosperity and gender equality will
eliminate this practice before the scales tip the other way again.

~~~
peteretep
Longer term, yes, absolutely. Also: rising personal wealth tends to sort the
problem out too...

But, the children who are going to cause this problem have already been born.
Takes 14-18 years to grow a girl of marriageable age, depending on where you
live...

Maybe a sophisticated market in wife futures will emerge.

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AngeloAnolin
This article is very absurd.

Everyone knows that oil (and other material resource on Earth) is a finite
resource - which means at some point, the planet will run out of it.

Economics would dictate that other energy sources would be developed (and is
already prevalent) that would take away oil away from the big part of the
equation.

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ajdecon
OK, fine. We won't run out of oil, it will just be prohibitively expensive,
especially for fuel applications.

(I've always thought it was a shame to burn such an interesting chemical
feedstock anyway.)

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ddw
The world will never run out of oil because once we realize that we are
running out of oil, we'll try to stop using oil.

