Well, I had to be a bit harsh to grab people's attention.
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Originally Posted by LH1
I like you am definitely not some environmentalist nut, but high gas/elec. prices should be the least of our concerns. The larger problem at hand is Global Warming. At some point we are going to pay the price for pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere. We're not going to stop doing that anytime soon so GW will just keep progressing.
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I actually read one paper claiming that the ready supply of oil would run out before we could even do irreversible damage to the global climate. That's certainly something I hadn't considered before. Of course, if the supply of cheap oil does actually last for another three decades (as some studies - including a recent USGS work - suggest), then global warming will become a huge concern. I don't think it's been decided yet whether global warming is a result of human activity or a natural occurance as part of a larger cycle, but more and more people seem to think that human activity is having at least some impact. Either way, better safe than sorry, I say.
One thing for environmentalists to consider is the fact that coal (of which the world - and the US and China in particular - have HUGE reserves of) is now being championed as an intermediary replacement for oil. As we all know, coal is even more damaging to the environment than oil.
In any case, our species has limped past, over and through near-catastrophes for centuries, but the problems we must deal with in the upcoming century (global warming, exhaustion/overextension of resources, severe overpopulation) are much more demanding than anything we've faced before. If I am to live long enough to see it, I will be pleasantly surprised to find that modern industrialized civilization survives the next one hundred years.