[Illuminated One]

Originally Posted by Omniziron

this is what the oil and auto want you to believe. although, it is actually very humanly natural to think in terms of technological determinism.

also, if you read on the history of the car, you will see that suitable batteries for it had been developed a century earlier. if we had stuck with battery technology, rather than switching to internal combustion, then battery and electric engine technology would far surpass the alternatives now.

This has nothing to do with determinism, but technology is indeed not anything goes. There are almost always technological reasons that make one solution more practical than the other.
Why is your calculator driven by solar and not by oil?
Because it's far more handy.
And you can't just expect all technologies to advance at the same rate if you just throw funds at them.

simply google "early electric cars" or better yet, if you have a university proxy to journal archives like JSTOR, you can read about the history of the car. further, if you have a university library with archived magazines from the late 19th century, you can see the trajectory of development of the car in the magazines and see the kind of propaganda adds ran by oil and auto. if you want to look up the work of Dan Lord, he is compiling and writing on all these things.

there is no practical reason to adopt oil, it was done simply for capitalistic motives. I'm not even so sure speed and range were practical benefits of oil at the time. they are today only due to the amount of investment put in this techonology. But even if it was, that may be why there was so much influence to create sprawling cities with suburbs and no mass trans or rail; this was needed to justify the rational for using oil.

electricity and most of its production methods are too liquid. oil is something that can be easily controlled.

Ok, I did.
From what I gather there was indeed some usage of electric cars, but that was (from my perspective) very impractical. The electric cars could drive about 100 miles and then had to be recharged for 8h.
With an oil based car - even if it has no better range - you just need to refuel for 2min and there you go again.
Combustion engines simply outdid electrical motors very quickly. Before that you had the competition.
Sure you can say electric cars had advantages, but from a buyers view these were mostly neglible compared to the disadvantages they had.
Where electricity works well there it has been adapted (for example suburban trains). Or look at military history - in WW2 Germany invested heavily into the development of electric submarines. But they still needed diesel engines to recharge. I'm pretty sure they didn't do that to remain dependent on oil.

I'm not saying that oil is the best thing, I'm actually in favor of using replenishing energy sources only, but there's no denying that oil is as of now still very useful and many problems have to be solved before we get away from it.

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

Why do you suppose the world doesn't destabilize over, say, platinum? Or paladium, or uranium? What is it specifically about oil that makes it so inherently destabilizing?

Why indeed?
Might well be that we run out of other resources if we don't calculate into the future.

Demand for any commodity is elastic. As price goes up, other alternatives become more attractive. Spurring the development of other alternatives. Free market economy in action.

We don't need a shortage of oil to have crashes. Now I don't want to know what happens when some big oil company announces that they can't deliver anymore and we still have a demand as high as today's.