This article very clearly and succinnctly explains the importance of fossil fuels and their by-products.
It does not go into the bigger issue of how the world is going to find a way to produce very large quantities of substitute liquid fuels and the 6,000 by-products that make the modern world possible. We don't know how to do it today without starting from fossil fuels. We don't know how to make synthetic fuels in very large quantities daily at an affordable cost.
