Eh, I would argue that it's different from buggy whips, because there is a (somewhat) limited supply of oil. The idea being that if it turns out you are off by

Eh, I would argue that it's different from buggy whips, because there is a (somewhat) limited supply of oil. The idea being that if it turns out you are off by a few years (or a few hundred years) in the buggy whip vs. car situation, and buggy whips are a thing for a while longer, well, it's not that hard to ramp up buggy whip production. I mean, you've got some training effort, sure, but there are more buggy whips to be made. The idea is that oil is different, simply because there's only so much of it. If it turns out you planned wrong and have to come up with a few more year's worth of oil, and you are out? yeah, you have a serious problem. As an aside, the hole in my argument is what was shown by oil shale. There is a lot more oil available at $100 a barrel than there is available at $20 a barrel. but the point is that at some point, we'll actually run out of the stuff, and even before then, we won't be able to make more oil the same way we had made more oil in the past; to get more oil, periodically, you need to come up with new ways of getting oil, usually at great expense.