I have to say that there are not many third-world countries with oil. Kuwait and the UAE are some of the richest countries in the world, Iraq used to be as good as the UK (In the cities, anyway) and the only thing that makes them poor is that they have corrupt leaders.
Apart from Iraq, of course, which just got blown back into the stone age.
I have to say that IMO the reason people are using fossil fuels is because they are easily available and also contain a massive amout of energy in a very small area. Also, if you could really be arsed, synthetic fossil fuels would not be too hard to make, as due to the first law of Thermodynamics, nothing ever just īdissapearsīat all.
If you burn coal, what you get is what it is made of. If you tried hard enough then you could stick them together again. Even a ten-year timespan would not be bad, as itīs not like there isnīt surfeit of oil, coal and gas around.
That said, nuclear power is easily attainable and you only need fifty tons of Uranium a year to power quite a large power station, unlike the 1000 tons (or something like that, itīs a ridiculously large amount) a day of coal needed for the same energy output.
Renewable energy sources are a nice idea, but to be honest at this point in time you need such a large amount of time and energy to be spent creating them that you might as well not bother.
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