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As an addendum, and as a lover as much as anyone of the lovely hum a finely tuned V8 makes at speed, at the current spend rate the world supply of crude oil will be gone by 2073. Completely gone. Out. By every competent analysis not funded by the oil industry. And sooner than that for setting on fire and burning to propel a vehicle. By that final decade, it will be more economical to take a couple of hundred pounds of $20 bills and light them up in your modified engine to get you down the road a mile or two. Most of the petrochemicals left will be used to make things we can't make with anything else, which encompasses quite a lot of modern technical equipment for casings, internal components and electronics. And for heating homes in the winter, which is nice. And then we will be out of those. Coal and natural gas will last a bit longer, but not on the order of centuries. And it takes a million years or so to make more, give or take, as far as we know.
So we can do a couple or three things. Prolong the supply by using less (which only prolongs the agony) or by using none (which does us no good because, well, no benefit). Or we can find alternative energy sources, which we already have, and are developing. But to be clear, it's not really a choice, and it has little to do with the environment. Electrical power has the advantage that it's portable (hard right now to run a vehicle with a nuclear reactor, except indirectly), and it can be generated from a variety of sources, including fossil fuels. But more importantly, from other, essentially eternal things, like sunlight, or wind, or gravity via falling water, or the mysterious action within an atom. And there well may be other, undiscovered energy sources. But make no mistake, if you are 20 years old, you will almost certainly be driving something powered by energy other than that generated by the compressed remnants of dinosaurs and prehistoric plants, within your lifetime, if you want to go faster than walking. Or riding a horse.
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