This Is the Beginning of the Age of...Extinction

[Random Boomer]

12. Caught between a rock and a hard place

A sustainable, eco-friendly world without oil can't sustain 8 billion people, quite possibly never, but most certainly not in the short-term. There is no way to painlessly dismantle modern life in a period of a few years.

We were already brewing climate trouble back when I was a child, and there were only 2.5 billion people then. Immediately stopping our oil-energy-dependency is essential for at least trying to avert cataclysmic climate change (no guarantee it will work), but doing so immediately would require walking away from a technological/agricultural/distribution infrastructure that can't be replaced immediately. This would result in widespread chaos and millions of deaths, not just the inconvenience of giving up plastic straws.

It's easy to hate on the oil companies, but we've all been sucking at the teat of modern technology. We love our cars, air-conditioners, computers, flights to a holiday destination, single-family houses, out-of-season food, and of course, children. We want government to wave a magic wand and fix things, to make the evil oil companies stop their drilling, as if this wouldn't immediately and catastrophically collapse our economy and our entire way of living.

There's no stop button. This wild ride will end when our infrastructure collapses, as it inevitably will, and when the human population collapses, which it inevitably will. That's the only way off, in the time remaining.