What will we do when oil becomes scarce?
We may well wonder what we will do tomorrow when there is no longer sufficient oil to provide fuel for our cars, to heat our homes and to manufacture everything that we currently do with it: clothes, fertilisers, chemicals, etc. When that happens, human beings will have to resort to other types of energy. However, at the current rate of world population growth, we will soon have to make major efforts to diminish our energy consumption anyway. And, this effort will partly come from energy-savings to be implemented. In actual fact, the best thing that we can do is to not waste our energy consumption.
It is also very important that we take quick steps to diversify our sources of energy so as to use the remaining oil for genuinely useful things only. We also use gas, as our preferred source of energy for heating purposes, and coal, soon to re-occupy a major place in society because it is the primary source of industrial energy in a large part of the world. But there is nuclear energy and, of course, there are renewable forms of energy. The entire system will have to be reorganised regarding the way in which energy is distributed, so as to use local forms of energy in conjunction with more global forms. This will then allow various areas of the world to become much more autonomous, depending on their specific living conditions and on the way in which they relate to the issue of energy. It is really essential for us to think ahead and to anticipate the fact that oil will gradually become scarcer in the decades to come.
