Expensive? Sure it is--now. Do you know how much a PC cost in 1981?

As I grow tired of repeating, energy is not technology and technology is not energy. PCs don't manufacture power - they consume power. All of our technology consumes power - in fact, the more technologically advanced a civilization becomes, the more power it consumes.

We've been trying to crack commercial fusion for over 50 years - as far as I can tell, we're no closer now than we were the day I was born almost 40 years ago. Solar still runs far behind coal, after decades of research, although it may soon finally be practical as a peak load smoother in warm, sunny climates. Wind, tidal and wave power all hold out promise, but combined they won't come close to making up for declining oil supplies even if they were aggressively deployed.

Just because there have been advances in one arena (semiconductors) does not mean there will be advances in others (power generation and storage). Where's my flying car? Fusion power? Supersonic airliners? Rocketbus service to our lunar colonies? Personal robots? Just because you want a technology doesn't mean you're gonna get it.

So why do you rule out the possibility that we will NEVER find an alternative?

I don't rule it out, but it seems highly unlikely we'll be able to find any alternative to oil, at least in the time alloted to us. Just because you want something really bad doesn't mean you're gonna get it. As they used to say in the Marines, wish in one hand and shit in the other - see which one fills up first.

Oil is an incredible energy source. For starters it's a liquid, and in many places throughout the world for the past 100 years all you had to do was stick a straw in the ground and suck it out. It's easy to ship, and can be refined into a number of products. Its energy density is incredible, especially once refined, and we've developed complex, though now low cost methods to refine it over the past century.

What makes oil unique is that it's both an energy source and an energy carrier (or easily converted into a carrier, like gasoline). There's absolutely nothing else out there on the horizon that would function as a direct replacement for oil. Everything else - from the hydrogen hype to advanced batteries and capacitors - isn't a source but merely a carrier. As such you're talking about replacing oil, which can be cheaply sucked out of the ground and performs both functions easily and in a way our entire infrastructure is adapted to, with alternatives that do neither.

Forget hydrogen. Its energy density is pretty sad, it's hard to transport because its molecules are so small it leaks out of most pipes and containers, and right now the biggest source is hydrogen cracked from natural gas, which we're also rapidly running out of.

Batteries are incredibly costly to manufacture and still come nowhere close to storing energy at densities which rival gasoline. And they aren't a fuel source themselves, just an expensive "gas tank" that wears out over time. You still need to charge them. Where are we going to get the electricity to do that from? You'd need to build hundreds of nuclear reactors just here in the US, hundreds of coal fired power plants or deploy trillions of dollars worth of solar cells, wind turbines and tidal generators to begin to generate the kind of electricity it would take to replace gasoline and other refined oil products, even assuming you had inexpensive batteries or other devices to store that energy for portable use.

We're obviously lacking either at the moment, and the task of rebuilding our oil-based infrastructure to function without oil is unimaginably complicated and expensive. It would probably be cheaper to bulldoze suburbia and move everyone back into the cities, where at least they could be serviced by electric rail - although here in the US we'd have to rebuild that network, since we allowed the oil, car and tire companies to gut it during the '50s. More trillions we don't have.