One way or another, we're going to stop using oil. Unfortunately, we didn't take the opportunity during the Age of Oil to plan for anything after oil. or we might have already passed the point-of-no-return where significant hardship and food shortages are impossible to avoid. The futurists of the 1940s and 50s assumed that we would solve this by building lots of nuclear reactors or other clean energy sources. If and when that oil runs out, or becomes difficult to extract for other reasons (including the fact that it's heating the planet up), we will have a real problem on our hands.

In a very real way, we are all eating oil. (Prior to this, there was a huge global market for 'saltpeter' and bat guano for fertilizer and other chemical processes.) The modern way of making fertilizer is called the Haber-Bosch process, which allows ammonia to be produced from fossil fuels. but that was because we started synthesizing huge amounts of fertilizer.

This didn't occur, of course, because food production kept up with population increases. Had this not happened, there was a predicted 'population bomb' that would have resulted in mass famine probably sometime in the 1980s or 90s. This is the so-called 'Green Revolution' of the 1950s and 60s, which brought high-yield monoculture farming from Europe and the US to the rest of the world. The current world population is only sustainable at present because we use large amounts of synthetic fertilizer.

Should i sleep naked