Re: 3rd Season Enterprise - Carpenter Street - 5 star poll - SPOILERS AHOY!

"Timo S Saloniemi" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Elvis Gump
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

>
> Oh, the number of people directly employed by the industry probably won't
> be that remarkable. It'll probably be much like the half-death of
> plantation industry with advanced synthetics and automation a century
> ago. And the distribution chain will probably adapt - if we get hydrogen
> cars, gas dealers will just start selling hydrogen, etc. One would imagine
> that the de-emphasis on oil will hurt Middle East the worst, due to the
> otherwise narrow industrial base.
>
> What is quite frightening is that this particular infrastructure is likely
> to collapse *globally* all at once, or within a few decades of the first
> symptoms anyway. If major industrialized nations stop using gasoline and
> diesel oil in their cars, it's not bloodly likely that the oil industry
> would be kept going to feed the developing country gasoline vehicles...
> Only China might afford to keep a gasoline industry going independently,
> and not be economically interested or capable of an upgrade.
>
> Timo Saloniemi

You touch on this above; petroleum goes to mroe than just transportation
needs; petrochemicals are used widely primarily in plastics but also in
other things such as drugs. I would think that even if everyone switched
over to solar, electric, Mr. Fusion, what have you for powering their flying
car or ground car we would still need large amounts of petroleum for that
purpose and the oil company would be kept going. And even then assuming that
civilians are using other sources, would this hold true for the military?
Can it retrofit all its surface ships (even though today many subs and
carriers if not all are nuclear powered many surface ships are not)? Or
tanks?
Also you can't forget corruption and political manuevering on this; I
remember reading that it a consortium of car, gasoline, and tire
manufacturers that put the street cars out of business in every American
city except SF for some reason; maybe something would hold true in the
future at least as a delaying tactic.
Possibly also as demand plummets for gasoline prices would fall too, making
it for a while again economically attractive at least maybe in oil producing
regions to drive gasoline-powered cars, perhaps in Alaska or Texas or more
likely the Middle East.

Tim