I would like to refine that to an economic model built on endless growth.

And I'll say that this view is wrong. The issue is the economic model built on CHEAP oil. (Cheap VS the other forms)

Oil just isn't a cheap form of energy. For your dollar you could get ~8 times as many BTUs from coal, 1.5-2 times as many BTUs from natural gas, ~100 times as many BTUs from yellowcake(with ~10 000 as many BTUs potentially extractable); I haven't done the calculations for wind and solar, but they're definetly far cheaper still.

The reason people keep buying so much oil at such a high cost is that it's easy to store, easy to transport, low capital cost of the equipment required to use it, burns relatively cleanly, high energy density.

The cheapest forms of energy are exactly the most costly and cumbersome ones to use; otherwise demand would drive their price up.

You can see for instance how this plays out for a vehicle. Natural gas is hard to store and it costs a lot of energy to compress it for use in a vehicle; but it's still fairly straight forward to power a vehicle with it. Coal would fail the emissions standards of every single country that has one and you'd kill an awful lot of people; you have to build the infrastructure to turn it into something like oil(e.g. see SASOL and the fisher-tropsch process) and you're likely to be required to deal with all that CO2 instead of just venting it to the atmosphere. Nuclear is only practical for powering electric trains, street cars and other grid tied vehicles and renewables can't even do that(not without back-up generation or enormous grid storage capacity).