Yeah, as it turns out fracking wasn't that difficult. But it took the industry some effort to find that out, effort that it didn't want to spend until it had to

Yeah, as it turns out fracking wasn't that difficult. But it took the industry some effort to find that out, effort that it didn't want to spend until it had to. The same may be true for a whole bunch of things - we don't do them now because that's not how we do things, and it'll take some effort and risk to try a new way. We have a local optimum that we're happy with until the environment changes and we have to discover another one. So possibly the assumption wasn't even "next oil is more difficult" but just "current oil is good enough". If you're making vast bank with the current process, why change? Which is the thing with growth collapsing. What works now won't work in the future, but that doesn't mean that nothing works in the future. There might be better ways of running an economy as we stop relying on growth to make everything work.