It's solar or bust for the human race.
It's true, when the infrastructure falls into place, and you're at a latitude advantageous for production of solar electricity.
Equally, the invention of batteries, and the evolution of solar energy gathering technology, it may only take minutes a day in cloudy conditions to create the kind of power we use daily in our industrial and domestic lives.
You could probably expect a paint on an automobile to turn both sun and warmth into electrical energy to power the car and store in batteries. Batteries will evolve into something beyond recognition. The whole world could be done over, and will be. Because you're right. The power of the sun makes oil look like a fart in the wind.
It's important to recognize limits on petroleum energy, because it may indeed be a supply that could go on forever, who knows?
The problem is basic. It takes a large concentration of energy simply to distribute petroleum, and if the demand for this form of energy is increasing, the infrastructure also needs to expand, which means the tankers need to be bigger, and sail more frequently, and the storage facilities need to be larger, and the pipelines need to expand, and the gas lines to the houses, and the gas stations for the increasing number of cars, and trucks, and trains.
In short, it becomes ungainly to deliver this form of energy, to be honest, plus, you build it, then, run out of oil. What a mess that's going to be. And you haven't replaced it. Which was supposed to happen in about 1975.
The actual projections for running out of oil stands at 50 years from now. That's also a blink and you're there.
Check out our latest pod with @JessePeltan, which is just 3 hrs straight of him dropping bangers like the one below pic.twitter.com/y6BbDykKXe
— DER Task Force (@DER_Task_Force) May 6, 2025