re: #183 darthstar

I’ll pay eight bucks a gallon. I’ll drive less, too, but I’m willing to adapt.

It would depend on how quickly and how feasible it would be to develop alternatives as it would take society several generations to fully adapt. Recycling of plastics, coal gasification, dramatic changes in lifestyles among many other alternatives would be necessary to bridge to longer term alternatives. It is not possible to adapt into an agrarian self sustaining community very quickly, so food would certainly be an immediate priority, if large scale fertilizer based farming might not be feasible. So food might certainly become expensive. Plastics can be formed from non petrochemical sources (soy, algae among other plantstuffs) but again may not be feasible immediately for some time and are based on a petroleum driven agriculture. I could envision hydrogen becoming an important fuel source with an emphasis such as with the atomic bomb or space program push.