Despite what we've been taught in our education system, "fossil fuels" do not in fact come from fossils nor of the transformed remains of long dead organisms.
The term "fossil fuel" was made up in 1892 by John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil Company single owner, in order to induce the idea of scarcity easing the increase of oil price.
If everyone knew oil was self-replenishing at a rate as fast as we wisely use it, and is the second most prevalent liquids available on earth after waters, we would have not been paying the amount we've been paying up now.
https://twitter.com/abduAlbadii/status/1541313250742403073
Our rate of consumption very seriously exceeds rate of new reserves, which were created long ago and over timelines that exceed human history.
When we use up what is here, that's it. And we will have changed the world for the worse long before we use it up.
Here are a couple brutal facts:
The energy density of these fuels is very high and that bootstrapped our current tech. It really was a one time gift.
If we had to do that again, as things are today, we would have a much harder time. Soon, we would not be able to do it, but we will have the tech we have created.
This means we need to use time and reasonably easy energy that remains to bootstrap ourselves onto other means before we can't do that.
If we fail at that a whole lot of people will die, due to lack of an energy source that compares to our current dependence. Food, materials, medicine, all sorts of things are dependent in all sorts of ways. Transport, manufacture, you name it.
There is a fairly long time line on all that however. It all gets super expensive soon, but not impossible for a longer time. Nobody really knows, or if they do, it is unclear. Yay right?
Sadly, should we fail to bootstrap o to other means soon, we will have released enough carbon to make our world a pain in the ass to survive and that raises the bar for the tech we need to bootstrap onto in order to make progress, not just cope with the harm already done, not to mention harm to be done over the next few decades.
We can produce similar fuels, but we really struggle to make them efficiently and carbon neutral, ideally carbon negative.
This all is a big deal and our future is not even close to secure.
It would be great to learn we have it easy!
But we really don't.
In my view the biggest error is consistently understating risks and costs, which biases answers to "what is worth what?" questions away from the level of effort needed to avoid real, global harm.
And I mean as humans. We are not doing very well with this type of challenge.
Fossil Fos"sil, n.
1. A substance dug from the earth. [Obs.] [1913 Webster]
but the word is now restricted to express the remains of animals and plants found buried in the earth. --Ure.[1913 Webster]