There is no economic or historical basis for this. When resources become more scare people begin looking into alternatives or alternate extraction methods.
This is how the iron age came to be. Iron was common to many local areas, but the tin to make bronze had to be imported from far away. It took innovation to develop the necessary techniques for iron smelting which turned out to be a superior material for tools in addition to being extremely common and readily available.
They use to think this way about crude oil. That we would eventually run out or that everybody needs to go to war to protect their strategic assets in the middle east. This turned out to be complete non-sense. Techniques that revolutionized natural gas extraction were adapted to oil extraction following massive oil price fluctuations. Now Texas out produces Saudi Arabia. Europe now produces large amounts of petroleum from Norway.
They used to also think this way about lumber and rubber, both of which are renewable resources. Now the world produces plenty of both with minimal environmental disruption.
The US has plenty of coal and coal is relatively cheap to extract and ship, but there will always be a minimal fixed price to coal-based energy. Renewable energy scales more efficiently and now is cheaper than coal due to wholesale energy production, especially in Texas which now also dominates renewable energy production.
When there is sufficient demand people will find a way well before going to war. War is very expensive.
> That we would eventually run out or that everybody needs to go to war to protect their strategic assets in the middle east. This turned out to be complete non-sense.
The way I see it, few wars for control over oil markets have already happened in the last few decades.
> When there is sufficient demand people will find a way well before going to war. War is very expensive.
I don't think this was ever true in history. In particular, this was a common sentiment before World War I - that nations are too connected economically, that it's in no one's interest to go to war. Didn't stop two world wars from happening in less than 30 years.
Societies have collapsed before, and it's likely to happen again. Climate change looks like an extremely good trigger for such an event. It's unclear whether we would be able to recover, or how long it would take.
All of these various competing problems can be summarized into three categories: economic, defense, and political. By far the least critical of those three is defense. I am saying this as a military office who has studied history. If you are wealthy you can fund a better military and better defensive protections. If you are poor but you are politically united and guided by strong leadership you will still probably figure it out. If your economy or food supply fall apart you likely won't have the political unity necessary to mount a strong defense. Likewise if the people are disenfranchised or selfishly entitled there will be less political will to prop up the economy.
It seems obvious they're talking about food.
I am not sure you're closely looked at hydraulic fracturing. One doesn't simply talk about petroleum production, they talk about the IRR of energy projects. That is a fair proxy for whether it takes more energy to get a hydrocarbon out of the ground than it contains. Yes, they are making more, but early entrants into fracking (Whiting, EQT, Pioneer, et al) have all done very poorly and destroyed a lot of equity value. I think a really good case can be made that fracking is intrinsically a financial phenomenon. Huge upfront capex with assumptions of years of production. The track record of that longer tail production is doing poorly (edit: even with different spacing and refracking) in most geologies. Plus, poor infra outside of the permian means more capex.
Lumber has issues too, which will very much be made worse by even a 2 deg C shift.
There is a reason that the US and most countries have huge farming subsidies. A country that cannot feed itself is collapses in very short order. You see this all over the middle east and northern Africa where almost every riot in the "Arab Spring" was about agricultural and food concerns. As you can see in adjacent countries, people migrate from conflict zones and put further stress on neighbors.
When your life and your childrens' live are on the line, you will respect no human or moral laws to get food. That is what terrifies everyone that sees the climate crisis accelerating and is familiar with the next steps of how it's likely to unfold.
Do you follow news at all?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-aramco-fire-trump/t...
I think what GP presented is too mild. What I personally fear is this: increasing migration pressure from the most affected areas and contention for resources starts triggering wars, at which point the global economy collapses, at which point at least half of the world's population dies of starvation. Remember, cities everywhere are running on just-in-time supply chains; they have food and water for a couple of days. It's mostly harmless when one city in a country suffers a catastrophe, because emergency response can be put into place. But if the whole country goes into disarray, or the imports of food suddenly stop, things are going to get very ugly very fast.