Many scientific paradigms rely on outdated information and knowledge. For example, it’s said that Newton would couch his theories in religious regalia. For most of the oil era, the story has always been “We’re about to run out of oil”. The stated scarcity of oil was traditionally used as a reason to find alternative energy sources. The idea was always “We’re about to run out”, from the earliest days of oil drilling. You may be familair with the term “peak oil”.
The other main reason to find alternatives was, of course, given our early dirty use of oil, the desire for cleaner air.
However, the solar-powered carbon cycle of life has been well-entrenched on Earth from the early years of the development of life. If you asked for a vote from green plants what type of energy they most prefer humans to use, they might easily vote “coal” since it provides the most carbon (CO2) for their benefit. Coal - the greenest energy we have? Well that might actually be true, if we really mean “green” when we saay “green”. Recent studies from space indicate a recent greening of the planet from our CO2 emissions. But we animals might vote back “no, coal is too dirty and nasty for us”, but with today’s new knowledge, maybe there is a compromise. We now know that the CO2 produced by our breathing, and our burning fossil fuels, ends up as methane clathrates at the bottom of the sea before it is subducted under the continental plates to slowly be turned into oil and gas deposits. That process takes millions of years, but with our new knowledge of the methane clathrate stage, we may have a possible opportunity to greatly shorten the carbon cycle, by directly using the methane in clathrates as fuel. Since little-to-no carbon ever leaves the planet, the carbon cycle could then be endlessly sustainable. In fact, it could even be envisioned that the oil companies and coal burning have inadvertently been bringing life back to a dying planet, where the thicker atmosphere that allowed Pterodactyls to fly, and the carbon essential for life of the surface of the Earth have slowly been subducted underground, leading to the present 2-million-year-old ice age, the existence of which is coincident with our own evolution, possibly in response to the need to survive it. Today we know there is a lot more oil out there, but areas with the most reserves are often saddled with drilling restrictions or, if that doesn’t work, placed into social upheaval to prevent a working drilling industry. Turns out the environmental movement has been in large part promoted by the money from big oil (Rockefellers, Al Gore, etc.) and has served to prevent excessive drilling which would cause a glut of oil as a cheap commodity, rendering existing drilling operations unprofitable. If the weather cycles change to a cooler state, they will have no problem finding other ways to maintain a certain amount of scarcity.
But meanwhile, from a scientific perspective, the relatively new information of the existence of methane clathrates, said to hold several times more hydrocarbons than all the admitted conventional underground fossil-fuel deposits, opens the possibility of maintaining hydrocarbon fuel use on a long-term sustainable basis. Don’t mean to shatter any fragile brain cells out there, but this is all pure science. Things are always changing as our knowledge base grows. The main reason I originally became interested in wind energy was because of familiarity with sailing and building kites, because it was new, exciting, fast, action-packed, and offered the concept of energy without paying for fuel. These basic drivers for wind energy will remain even if clathrates become a renewable fuel source.