These ideas are based partly on faulty reasoning, I made a post on exactly that topic a few days back, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9357326 https:

These ideas are based partly on faulty reasoning, I made a post on exactly that topic a few days back, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9357326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9357326 In short, it's unlikely that a civilizational reboot would be bereft of fossil fuels to spur its early stages of development and growth (they most important stages, by far) because such stages require very little fossil fuels compared to an industry in full swing and many small, lower quality, less profitable (though still easily exploited) reserves will have been passed over by modern industry. It's unlikely that even in a severe future resource crunch that every coal mine will be stripped bare and every oil well pumped dry. We won't resort to digging out a pittance worth of coal out of some abandoned mine that is now in the middle of a suburb, we'll do as we're doing now, adapting new technologies to push the boundaries of new, substantive reserves. Such as open pit strip mining of coal using drag lines, fracking, tar sands, deep ocean drilling, etc. But those small reserves, those reserves that are economically disadvantageous and inconvenient for us to exploit today, they would probably be adequate for bootstrapping industry again, likely sufficiently to enable them to develop more sustainable approaches. Or simply other ways of doing things. It would take hundreds of years of intensive use for humanity to exploit all of the easily extractable coal in the world, I put the odds of that happening as very low (if humanity can survive a few hundred more years then they have a pretty good chance of surviving indefinitely, in my opinion). And with coal you can do anything else, make plastics, make hydrocarbons, what-have-you. Mind, I'm not advocating this, I'm simply pointing out the flaw in the logic here. Personally I'd rather we switched over to mostly nuclear power sooner rather than later.