If you still don't think we need to be moving toward alternatives to oil, world oil markets are doing their best to change your mind. Yesterday, oil prices set a new record high of over $86 a barrel. The price jumped even though the Oil Producing and Exporting Countries (OPEC) decided last month to boost their production by 500,000 barrels a day.
This happened because it is expected that in the next year, non-OPEC nations will produce 110,000 barrels a day less than they currently produce. At the same time, demand for oil is expected to increase by 100,000 barrels a day. Oil inventories held by the largest industrialized nations have fallen below their five-year average.
Oil is a finite resource. Whether we like it or not, the supply of oil is going to run out someday -- maybe much sooner than we expect. Estimates of the amount of oil remaining are at best just an educated guess. No one really knows how much is left.
Even if we were to ruin our wilderness and ocean areas by drilling for oil there, with the expanding demand for oil we would only delay the inevitable for a few years. That makes the search for alternate energy sources more important than ever.
Exploring new technologies like electric and hydrogen powered cars are not just a pie-in-the-sky solution to global climactic change. With the rising price and dwindling sources of the world's oil supply, it is an absolute necessity.
We need to stop thinking of alternate energy sources as future technologies. We need to treat this problem like we did our effort to get to the moon. We need to spend whatever is necessary to fund a massive effort to solve the problem of alternate energy sources -- not in the future, but in our own time.
For our own good, it is time to jump off the oil bandwagon.
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