But Falcon, all your arguments are based on the assumption that things will be done in the same way in the future as they are done now. As oil runs out, things will have to be done differently. The greater the shortage in oil, the greater the incentive to find alternatives. This is not to say that we're not headed for problems. Clearly we are. But the assumption that no solutions will be found to those problems is a silly one.
I understand your point, and agree with it to some extent. But the magnitude of the incentive is not, of itself, a guide to the likelihood of success - ask anyone on a death bed. There are some things in life which are predicaments i.e. without solutions, rather than problems - a temporary extravagant surplus of energy has rather insulated us from that fact, which is about to reassert itself.
I am not suggesting that no solutions are discoverable. But we are limited both in the time we have available, and the resources we have available, to effect a solution. The nature of the failure mechanism in complex systems (of which the contemporary global political economy is an example) is that the descent to less complex states is discontinuous and rapid after onset commences - a formal way of saying that collapse is rapid, once it begins. All the conditions are in place. We are now functioning for as long as some random excursion of a critical variable e.g. typing "trillion" rather than "billion" into a trading computer (again) doesn't trigger phase change. And we have never begun a primary energy transition at such an advanced state of depletion of the dominant energy source. In practical terms we now have no marginal surplus above that quantity of energy necessary to sustain the complexity of the existing system with which to construct an alternative energy system. We are changing the engines out in flight, so to speak.
So it becomes orders of magnitude more difficult, the later we leave it.
In my view, the whole hi-tek solar/smart grid thing is a hallucination and fatal misdirection, in that context. We don't have the time for it, we don't have the energy for it, we don't have the resources for it and, even if we did, it makes the same assumption you accuse me of i.e. that there will be a thing called "the global industrial manufacturing system" (in point of fact they don't assume it, most of them aren't even aware of it in the first place).
In my view, we would be rather better served accepting that the best course of action lies in radical demand destruction and steady state economics, and set about reorganising society on that basis with as much energy as our political system will allow. The deleterious consequence of pollyanna solar optimists is the complacence it engenders in society at large that a grown up is going to allow the party of cheap flights to Marbella, and Chelsea tractors, to go on.
Rover's comical doltishness would be amusing if it wasn't, in fact, a reasonable proxy for current levels of ignorance and complacency. I can't see how thrilling over how quickly renewables has grown from 0.75% to 1% of global supply in the last decade improves that...
