In many places in the EU, Japan and soon China, airplanes are being displaced by high speed rail.

And as a mining engineer you know that a primary calculation by the profession is the breakeven between conveyor belts (driven by electricity) and trucks (driven by oil ATM). Just skew the economics heavily towards conveyor belts and against trucks.

Alan

I dislike the "Cubic Mile Model" immensely.

Among other things it assumes that we will consume the same amount of energy.

We won't. We will do things more efficiently and we will frequently do without.

The economy will not be the same on the downslope because it cannot be, and attempts to make it so are doomed to failure.

Keep your stick on the ice. We're all in this together.

VK,
"We have, as of now, no renewable energy source, nor combination
of sources, that can scale up quickly enough, or provide anywhere
near to the energy equivalent of oil, to avoid a severe, worldwide
energy shortage."
Wind energy has been increasing at 30% for last 15 years,(50% last year), so doubling every 2.4 years. The US uses 190Billion gallons of gasoline and distillate/year and another 15-20MJ of electricity and NG(5KWh) to refine that from crude oil. It requires 10kWh in a similar sized EV to travel the distance that one gallon of gasoline can move an ICE vehicle. Hence would need about 1000Billion kWh to replace that 190Billion gallons( about 120GW average). The present wind turbines operating in US generate 9GW average(28GW capacity) so would need X13 present wind capacity( less than 4 doubling or <10years) so could have this energy in place by 2020.

We probably won't have all cars EV or PHEV by 2020, but we could have about 50% of VMT electric by this date. I am not sure if you think the US will have 50% of today's oil available and I don't think anyone knows.

" our entire economic infrastructure is oil, not electron or hydrogen, based. The economy might not be able to work as well on non-oil based energy. For example, could
airplanes, or large mining trucks, be run on batteries?

When you turn on your lights, or boil a kettle or turn on an A/C do you use oil?. Does you TV or computer run on oil? I think kerosene lighting went out 100 years ago. We have the infrastructure in place to use electric vehicles, every home has them; 110volt outlets. The grid in not being used at full capacity in evenings and can handle another 180GW of overnight demand( 18% of capacity). May have to give up most air travel, so what?
Many mining trucks, shovels are already electric, or diesel electric and could be converted to all electric. Same for trains. We will need oil for ocean shipping( about 3% of world oil use), 1% for agriculture. Do you think we will be able to manage to recover 4% of present oil production in 30-40 years? If not I am sure CNG or chemical storage would work on ships as weight is not an issue.