I can't help but agree with your last statement.

The rich don't care. They expect to be buffered by their ill-gotten gains.

They may be right.

That's the problem I have, there's a chance if we do nothing there may be a bad outcome. However there is absolute certainty that poor people will starve to death if we "just stop oil". Infact if we attempted to do this now, civilisation as we know it would collapse, as we rely on fertilizer, cement, plastics and steel. We have no way replacing oil right now.

Fertilizer is nitrate, sulfur and potassium, not oil. Cement and plastics have solid enough replacements out there, need to be deployed finally. Steel is harder but there are composites, biotech and carbon options.

The only problem is trucks, diesel trains, tractors and some ships. Ships could just go the old slow way. Diesel trains have electric replacements, trucks and tractors are hard though mostly due to sheer numbers. Then we have airplanes, big ones have no replacement but we can live without them. The pharmaceuticals we can make from biomaterials, no serious mining. Industrial heat might be a problem for a hot moment but there are some possibilities.

Water however is the key issue we will face and cannot really go around.

As far as I know we have no way to produce fertilizer at scale other than the haber-bosch process, and this requires fossil fuels.

I'd be happy to be wrong about this!

The haber process requires only nitrogen, hydrogen, and a metal catalyst.

Now we care about poor people, when we knew all this would happen almost 50 years ago? The time to save people was somewhere around 1975. Now we're out of alternatives.

Have you not seen the "wet bulb" temperatures in the US? People are already dying from Climate change. If we "just stop oil" I don't know that I believe there's a guarantee people will starve to death. There are reserves of oil, and I think the biggest issue is that there are a number of businesses that just need to stop relying on it.

If you would prefer, an alternative is that the (US) Gov't could 1. take over the oil companies 2. Raise the price of oil 3. Force the "Free market" that everyone's so proud of to start dealing with Oil as if there is actual scarcity for it.

If they did that tomorrow, I suspect they could stop a number of the worst polluters (businesses), and make everyone actually start working for the goal of "zero emissions".

People would hate this, and people would complain about the gov't overstepping, but the oil companies aren't going to start doing this out of the goodness of their hearts as long as they're making money hand-over-fist like they are.