Fossil fuels allowed the human race to operate… complex systems at gigantic scales. Renewable energy sources are not compatible with those systems an… - James Howard Kunstler

The belief that “market economics” will automatically deliver a replacement for fossil fuels is a type of magical thinking like that of the cargo cults of the South Pacific.
This age-old tendency of humans to believe in magical deliverance and to wish for happy outcomes has been aggravated by the very technological triumphs that the oil age brought into existence. Technology itself has become a… supernatural force, one that has demonstrably delivered all kinds of miracles within the memory of many people now living […]. There's no question that technology has prolonged life spans, relieved misery, and made everyday life luxurious for a substantial lucky minority. […] A hopeful public, including leaders in business and politics, views the growing problem of oil depletion as a very straightforward engineering problem of exactly the kind that technology and human ingenuity have so successfully solved before, and it, therefore, seems reasonable to assume that the combination will prevail again. There are, however, several defects in this belief.
One is that we tend to confuse and conflate energy and technology. They go hand in hand, but they are not the same thing. The oil endowment was an extraordinary and singular occurrence of geology, allowing us to use [a fraction of] the stored energy of millions of years of sunlight. Once it's gone it will be gone forever. Technology is just the hardware and programming for running that fuel, …not the fuel itself. And technology is… bound to the laws of physics and thermodynamics […]. All of this is to say that much of our existing technology simply won't work without petroleum, and without the petroleum "platform" to work off, we may lack the tools to get beyond the current level of fossil-fuel-based technology. Another way of putting it is that we have an extremely narrow window of opportunity to make that happen. In the meantime, here are the problems with the various alternative fuels, based on what we know now.

Industrialism hasn’t been an abiding set of activities in any particular place but rather a dynamic cycle, of takeoff, peak, and ebb. It has rotated from region to region and country to country, along the way disposing of whole classes of people when it was through with them, chewing through habitats, resources, political systems, and landscapes. The working classes of Europe and America had their decades of factory life and the scene has shifted to Asia, which may be peaking now in the face of constraints on fossil fuels. In the United States, the cultural memory lingers on of the brief, ecstatic period after the Second World War when men on the automobile assembly lines made better salaries than college professors and factory workers enjoyed all the blandishments of suburban living. But of course that was the very peak of the cycle in America. The same class of people is now on the scrap heap, reduced to minimum-wage service jobs at best, or relegated to the cottage industry in outlawed drugs, with the gaps filled by subsidized idleness. Great Britain is a similar story, with Germany and France less eager to surrender their manufacturing.

Because… systems are self-organizing in the face of circumstance, the big questions are how much disorder must we endure as things change, and how hard will we struggle to continue a particular way of life with no future? […] The… economy of the decades to come will center on farming, not high-tech, […] “information,” or “services,” or space travel, […] tourism, or finance. All other activities will be secondary to food production, which will require much more human labor.