[quote=The Nexerus]
Oil is never going to die out. We're never going to make plastics out of hydro-electricity or the wind. Calling the oil industry a necessary evil is unnecessarily pessimistic. It's the attitude that causes objection to things like Keystone XL.
[/quote]

Then we will have to find an alternative to plastics. [i]Oil is finite.[/i] One day, we're gonna run out. It isn't produced nearly as fast as we use it, and simple mathematics tells us that means it is gonna run out someday, and we're gonna have to rely on something else someday. If anything, it tells us that our investment in alternative energy sources is even more important - we need to stop using our reserves of oil on energy, when other options exist, so that we have as much as possible to produce other things that we can [i]only[/i] get from oil.

And I don't think it's pessimistic, it's realistic. Believing oil will last forever and never preparing a fallback plan for when it runs out and everything goes tits up would be ridiculously over-optimistic.