I know this isn't the point, but....


One thing that various people seem to have forgotton is that you can reform coal into petroleum. In simple terms, it's split and reassambled into smaller hydrocarbons, which tend to be in the petrol-diesel range

It's not an easy process, and it's dirty, but it works. The only two places I know it has been done at scale is Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa, neither of which could import oil. The US has huge coal reserves. So does the UK and Australia, and quite a bit of Western Europe.

We should be building serious nuclear power plants, actually do the research to get fusion working, and expect fairly much everything to run on batteries or hydrogen. We will not get the developed world to use less energy. We might get manage to change the source of it though.