Certainly guys like the CEO mentioned above aren’t going to sit and watch their revenue stream disappear. They will continue to stay in the energy/natural resource business by providing solutions.
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The buggy mfgs did not invent the car. If anything big oil as been the biggest impediment to replacing it’s number one product for obvious reasons. This assertion is silly. Business in general does not look too far ahead of the next quarter. That’s just in it’s nature.
No amount of alternatives can replace oil just due to thermodynamics(which is a science, unlike economics). Oil is solar energy that nature cooked for 500 million years in a subterranean crock pot. Energy is not “created” and technology is not energy. Technology transfers energy from one form to another, which takes….energy. Oil or energy, for that matter, are not the problem. Our expectations on how to run a civilization are, as well as, our social organization. There is abundant energy, just not to support the current infrastructure or to continue to “grow” in the sense we are expecting. Future innovation will be social to adjust to the predicament combined with technical. Economics needs to be updated to the 21st century and not stuck in the 18th century like it is. A Dark ages could happen because they have before. In middle ages europe they burned scientists at the stake. Today they call them doom and gloomers or pessimists for going against the dominant orthodoxies.
Looking at the predicament through an economic-monetary lens limits your scope of thought. It won’t be fixed that way. In fact, I submit that it makes it worse. you mention sneaking up on us, well, BOO!, it’s here. It was hidden and ignored for economic reasons.
If we are at peak, we collectively put ourselves in the worst position we could possibly be in and we made the stupidest decisions in the run up. it also means the global economy is done growing by definition. No increased energy, no increased work. Follow that logic to it’s conclusion given the nature economics and global debt load.
