Yeah, given what sort of stories one reads about science at most internet sites you'd think we'd actually have a way to turn electricity + H2O + CO2 into oil (a

Yeah, given what sort of stories one reads about science at most internet sites you'd think we'd actually have a way to turn electricity + H2O + CO2 into oil (and sugar, and bread, and proteins, and plastics, and so on and so forth). But we don't. We do not have anything remotely resembling a reasonable option to do this. There's Fisher-Tropsch, but it's horrifically inefficient. So we're dependent on plants to do the work for us. In reality we don't know at all how to efficiently make molecules that have more than 4-5 atoms in them. Oil has hundreds to thousands, depending on the oil. Sugar only has a few dozen (depending on the sugar, starting at 20, going up to several hundred). Kinda pathetic really.