Energy and common sense

President Obama gave a speech about energy recently.  It was the more or less usual "we need all sources," "less reliance of foreign oil," etc.  While the proposals weren't necessarily bad they were largely irrelevant!

Consider that today most of the world (all of the industrialized world) gets most of it's energy from fossil fuel.  This started in a serious way with the industrial revolution in the later part of the 18th century.  That's just a couple of hundred years ago.  Today fossil fuels are becoming increasingly less available and more expensive.  With the spread of western style economies demand for these fuels is expected to dramatically increase.
While enormous reserves of those fuels remain the current and expected use rate will see them depleted in a few tens to hundreds of years.  In short, humanity will consume the worlds recoverable supply of fossil fuels in something like three or four centuries.  While there is uncertainty in how long it takes to create fossil fuels naturally, these fuels take thousands to millions of years to form.

Fossil fuel is clearly not a sustainable source of energy.  It doesn't matter if you drill deeper, open new reserves, extract oil shale, or fracture rock.  It doesn't matter if you cut off mountain tops or strip the earth away.  Ultimately fossil fuels will be used up in another 5 or 10 generations.

Common Sense believes that the time to aggressively adopt sustainable energy technology was 40 or 50 years ago when it was obvious that the world would run out of fossil fuel in the entirely foreseeable future.  After having wasted two generations it is clearly time to adopt sustainable energy technology now, at least if there is any common sense.