At some point humans are going to run out of the fossil fuels that power their lives.
There is no other end point to the current era — either because we've used them all up or because the Earth's climate cannot bear any further destruction.
If you use data from oil and gas giant BP, as the data cataloguers at Knoema did, at present rates of extraction we'll be out of oil by 2067, natural gas by 2069, and coal by 2121.
It's possible that we'll discover more oil trapped in tar sands or deep under the ocean, but it just gets more expensive and riskier to extract.
And we'll still run out.
Plus — we don't even want to use all the fossil fuels we have. Burning nonrenewable fuels makes the atmosphere warmer, and burning coal (which will be what's left if we run out of oil and gas) is worse than using other energy sources.
If we get to that point, the limiting factor won't be how many years of fossil fuels we have left, it will be how much more atmospheric change the planet can take. Some researchers already think we've reached the point where there's enough carbon in the atmosphere to cause catastrophic impacts to humanity.
That's why video game designer/Iron Man-protagonist Elon Musk tells Wait But Why's Tim Urban that the "indefinite extension of the Fossil Fuels Era" is "the dumbest experiment in history."
As Musk further explains it:
"The greater the change to the chemical composition of the physical, chemical makeup of the oceans and atmosphere [due to increased carbon emissions], the greater the long-term effect will be. Given that at some point they'll run out anyway, why run this crazy experiment to see how bad it'll be? We know it's at least some bad, and the overwhelming scientific consensus is that it'll be really bad."
This feeling is what led Musk to get involved with the electric car company that became Tesla, as he tells Urban in one part of a wide-ranging conversation.
Tesla's official mission is "to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible."
If Tesla can convince the world that cars can run without oil, that would make a huge difference — burning oil is responsible for about a third of greenhouse gas emissions, and getting electricity from a power plant through an electrical grid is more efficient than burning gas.
Even in places in the US where coal provides a good proportion of electrical power, electric vehicles are still cleaner than gas-powered cars. But for true sustainability, electricity production needs to change too. In particular, countries need to stop using coal, as soon as possible.
Sustainable alternatives include renewables like hydroelectric power, wind power, solar power, and geothermal power. Nuclear power is also far cleaner than any sort of fossil fuel energy source.
Musk's idea is to convince the world that moving away from fossil fuels is possible, because this will have to happen no matter what, and the sooner it happens the better shape the world will be in.
Here's a Wait But Why chart that explains where we're at:
Right now, we're just going along using fossil fuels, despite the fact that we know this is a bad idea and it has an endpoint. The sooner we get past that point and move to the next era in energy, the better.
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