It's pretty depressing to think of all the extremely talented people working their socks off to find oil fields, directed to do so by fools who don't realise we can never safely use them. It would be much better if they were working on sustainable technologies instead.
You say that like "not now" is "never". What is depressing is that people would rather let the tragedy of the commons and collapse play out at full speed, rather than giving ourselves a chance at achieving better sustainability.
I think we agree? There's a huge amount of effort being spent on extracting fossil fuels which will destroy our planet which could reasonably be used to develop sustainable technologies instead.
We don't want to burn even all of our existing already-being-extracted oil fields, but chances are we'll always be extracting some oil.
So what's the highest quality, cheapest to extract, least environmentally damaging oil we could extract? Should we extract as much oil as we can from our current fields or shut them down and go elsewhere? Should we drain any field we are using completely dry or should we just take some from a lot of sites before shutting each down? Is it better to frack site A or put a deepwater rig at site B or a conventional well at site C?
I could imagine a golden future where petroleum is a relatively minor but important resource, and where all the exploration now is a valuable dataset for deciding the most ethical way to extract it.
Once we're no longer burning gasoline, oil may no longer be the cheapest carbon feedstock (presently the economies of scale in refining make chemical plant oil cheaper). Maybe instead we will be pulling the carbon out of the air like plants do, or using plants to pull the carbon out of the air.
