The Meaning of Life 69
one can afford to buy it. Depending on who you ask, the
consequences of higher oil prices will affect the world in
different ways.
The most negative scenarios says that our society will
become more like North Korea’s. A plane ticket across the
Atlantic Ocean will cost $50 000. We will use bikes, horses,
and boats to transport what we used to transport with
gasoline vehicles. It has been estimated that the production
of food per area of grown food will decrease by 75 percent
because fertilizers are made from petroleum products, so
we have to leave the cities and begin to grow our own food
on the countryside.^42
The most positive scenarios says that as the price of oil
increases, the society will automatically transform into a
society not dependent on oil. “The Stone Age did not end
for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the
world runs out of oil,” a Saudi oil minister said. Consumers
will become more positive to electric cars because it’s too
expensive to drive the cars with a gasoline engine. To fly
across the Atlantic Ocean, engineers will invent airplanes
powered by electricity. This is the scenario Elon believes
in. “For energy, you do have a gradual increase in the price
of oil and changes in the supply curve, which will force
innovation,” he said.^52
We can find several examples of this forced innovation
if we look a few years back in time. In 1973, the first global
oil crisis hit the world with full force. Several oil exporters
from the Middle East limited the supply of oil because US
supported Israel during the Yom Kippur war. The price of