We really have to drastically cut down on oil use, say by half, by 2020, because the amount of oil on the world market for sale will drop by half. Mexico will cease exporting say by 2012, Iran by 2014, and many of the major exporters will follow. That is bad enough, but then they will turn into net importers. We could easily have price spikes into the several hundreds of dollars a barrel. This puts some fairly hard deadlines on when we have to really transition to the replacements.
I do agree that several decades from now, many people may wonder what all the fuss was about, but we could also have a titanic crash that takes a lot longer to recover from because the population has tripled. And over the next decade, we have a big problem.
One disturbing thing about all these replacement sources of fuel is that they don't actually exist yet... or exist in prototype form. In other words, these things should work, but we have never actually made them work. That is usually a huge red flag. Things can appear to be simple but take much longer than anticipated. After all, some of the first cars were electric with batteries, but a century later, we still can't quite get them to work. Then we will have to get the cost down.
Another problem is that the arguments appear to be directed to the 6,000,000,000 on Vulcan, not to the 6,000,000,000 on Earth. Do we really expect rational choices to be made by humans after the nonsense we just witnessed? I installed a solar water heater 30 years ago. It saved me 30,000 dollars. Therefore, everyone in Hawaii has done the same thing. Yeah, right. Only 25% of residential hot water is by solar in Hawaii. That is pitiful.
An don't forget Jevons Paradox: the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.
So I think the author is making some very serious errors in estimates by assuming that almost all people will instantaneously make rational long term decisions. They can't control how much they spend and how much they eat. Read the comments on any publication and see the posts about how "I don't drive a Toyota because I don't drive an appliance... My SUV makes a statement about who I am..." They are not going to undergo the Vulcan Kohlinar ritual and become rational overnight.
What is being asserted is that the oil available to oil importing countries will say drop by half over the next decade and the price will go to hundreds of dollars a barrel, but that the so far nonexistent replacement technologies will scale up properly on schedule to fill the gap, when some of the oil importing countries are bankrupt.
I hope so, but past performance is not reassuring.
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