Yeah, our dependence on fossil fuels is a huge problem, and not just because of climate change (which might also kill us).
Mobile phones didn't exist when I was young, and there are certainly a lot of them now even if they are low power devices, so it would be interesting to see electrical usage patterns pre-mobile phones vs. today.
The same goes for cars. Cars were using leaded gasoline in the US and getting 8 to 12 mpg, and now 30 to 35 mpg or greater on the highway, but do people drive more frequently, and with single riders?
Another question is would any cooling of the total Earth's heat energy be offset by global warming? The thermal differential would be less thereby slowing the migration of heat to the surface?
Or maybe we want to terraform our own planet to counter climate change. These things could use amounts of energy orders of magnitude higher than we use today.
I'm sure 100 years ago didn't expect we would launch 100,000 airplane flights every day [0] :) Nor did they think we would send spaceships to Mars.
It seems somewhat unreasonable to assume that our energy usage is going to exponentially increase due to as-yet-unforeseeable future needs and at the same time assume that we'll completely fail to find additional energy sources in the same timeframe.
We are willing to concede that usage patters from 100 years ago are unrealistic current realities.
However we would simultaneously like to use the current reality to project future realities that are much farther away (in some cases 19 million years away).