Energy cannibalism is happening so fast that the collapse of the oil industry will derail renewables

There’s no time to lose. The new research led by the French team confirms that whether we like it or not, human civilisation is in the midst of the most rapid transformation of the global energy system we’ve ever experienced. And hanging on for dear life to the old, dying fossil fuel paradigm is a recipe for civilisational suicide. Nafeez Ahmed

French scientists warn that the oil industry is collapsing so fast it will derail renewables, Nafeez Ahmed wrote in Byline Times.  

In just 13 years, a team of French government energy scientists found that global oil production could enter “a terminal and exponential decline, accompanied by the overall collapse of the global oil and gas industries over the next three decades.' This collapse could derail any effort to transition in time for green energy to fill the gap, leaving a world of nearly 8 billion people in some form of economic collapse that will be impossible to escape.

It's not that the earth doesn't have plenty of fossil fuels locked below the surface to exploit. But, the oil industry has to use more and more energy to extract additional sources of oil and gas. The low-hanging fruit of easily accessible oil exploitation is long gone. The industry is finding extraction more brutal to remove energy from oil reserves miles below the ocean surface, exploiting the world's carbon sinks such as the Amazon and the Congo, and the risky extraction from thawing permafrost and drilling in the Arctic ocean. “The oil industry is increasingly eating itself to stay alive. The oil and gas industries are consuming more and more energy exponentially to keep extracting oil and gas. That's why they've entered a downwards spiral of increasing production costs, 'diminishing profits, rising debt, and irreversible economic decline.”

The transition to green energy requires massive amounts of carbon to build the infrastructure and for the installation of the technology.  If the oil industry collapses, it will jeopardize the transition.