Because there is one and we need to start facing the challenges it presents, especially  us drivers. Some of the alternatives are explored by David Biello in this article “Biofuel: Natural gas is shaking up the search for green gasoline” in the always excellent Nautilus.

Helping to keep us mobile, new energy businesses comprising an ‘olive economy’ (not quite green, not completely black) are exploring a host of fuel alternatives, with the aim of creating ‘transition products’ that can ease us off our oil-based addictions.

One of the article’s contributors offers that we might have to pay a premium for these new fuels, as we have become accustomed to for, say, organic food. I’d venture we (or our governments) should reverse that – making the ‘natural’ oil the premium product and subsidise the alternatives.

Whatever else, we know we’ll eventually run out of the stuff that nature’s laid-down over millennia. Exploiting the last reserves – drilling in our last pristine place or fracking all over the countryside – is still finite.

These transition products are realistically our only solutions to keeping the wheels turning. For more on the conversations of how to fuel the future, have a look at the work of the The Rocky Mountain Institute.

Illustration is by the excellent Coin-Op Studio – take a look at their great work.