Is There a Future Where Oil Could Power the Whole of the Earth?

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It seems unlikely, but it's not impossible that we could learn ways to use oil. And then if we couldn't use oil after whiles it got more scarce, the price would go up. The process of innovation steered by prices and scarcity is what has worked for the last few hundred years. Now, you're suggesting there might come a future where that wouldn't work any more because everything would be used up. Is that a fair way to characterize what you're worried about? It seems to me as though you were asking the wrong question Somehow.

Of all the scenarios that keep astrophysicist Sandra Faber up at night, it's not the Earth's increasing volcanism, the loss of photosynthesis, or even the impact of a massive asteroid. Rather, it's the collapse she's certain will result from the unbridled growth of the world's economies. Join Faber and EconTalk host Russ Roberts as they explore what the most inexorable law of physics has to do with economics and whether the world's growing economies pose a problem or provide the solution for the finiteness of planet Earth.