You want the oil to last longer you either need to reduce the human population or people need to consume less.
That first option leans into ecofascist narratives (which ought to be enough to disqualify the idea on its own) but similarly importantly as far as pollution and ecological impact goes, a small comparatively rich minority of the global population is responsible for most of it so a very localized reduction would be far more effective (or possibly the only actually effective take on it) than the oversimplified "there's too many humans" line
used in the west and wouldn't be quite as wildly unethical (still pretty damn awful though).
The problem i'm thinking is that transitioning to the renewable power is going to necessitate a significant life style change for most of the world and the sad truth is that while I would love to blame the resistance to making those changes solely on the rich and powerful, every time I order a brand new Iphone even though my old one stills works perfectly fine, I'm causing damage. I'm consuming more resources than I actually need which needs oil to manufacture, transport, build the plastic cover on it, to create the electricity to power it.
Moving on, the second option "
degrowth" (of bad naming choices that
relies on a very regional type of French...) is such an option which requires
no genocides and might legitimately improve the living standards of many by simply giving up on "lucrative waste" as I'd call a lot of monkey-brained
"numbers go up" GDP-inflation measures that are by any other rational observation often completely pointless or actively harmful.
There's no reason to make that phone impossible to upgrade nor exceedingly difficult to repair besides the fact it's profitable (the ultraslim aesthetic they purposely popularized was a way to "justify" those flaws). Software (and so hardware) requirements? Their growth is artificially inflated by the fact that inefficiency is practically rewarded by new sales, so craftsmanship is thrown away hurriedly.
I'm having a pretty hard time staying away from certain rules, which kind of make it hard t
o address the topic. But essentially,
McDonaldization and
Goodhart's law make for an awful mix.
You'd be surprised at how destructive the production of batteries for all those fancy consumer electronics actually is, but especially for all those stupid EVs and assorted superfluous goods that technophiles wank themselves off to, in figurative and literal terms.
Compared to that, some rubber, synthetic or latex, and fabrics and paper plus dyes is positively benign...
That's really only because of the myopic obsession with energy density. Aqueous-electrolyte batteries are far less damaging and
for stationary applications are perfectly viable.
Portable applications would suffer from the lack of density, but making it easy to charge-up relatively quickly (such as via batteries chemistries that don't explode or catch fire if they happen to charge up a bit too quickly) helps with that.
For non-stationary and non-portable applications you quite often don't really need batteries much, for example:
trolleybuses, trams and trains (all of which are mature technologies) could very well have means by which you can charge your equipment on the go, while requiring minimal on-board battery power thanks to
pantographs.
.
