There are plenty of ways to get around the oil problem, offcourse they won't happen till it really is a problem, but I look forward to it. It's going to be a great movie and very enriching for those with a rational view of the big picture.
I agree with that statement although I must point out that it will take quite some time to bring about a major shift.
1. Develop the new technologies.
2. Tool up to start production. Even if we we came up with alternative vehicles (for example) tomorrow, it will be years before every major car manufacturer has tooled up to put it in every new vehicle. The use of petrol engines would thus continue to increase in the short term.
3. Time to actually roll it out. For vehicles that's 20 years. For things like major power stations we're talking 30 - 60 years.
Back in the 1990's there were still a lot of electric utilities trying to work out what to do with their 1970's (built as a result of investment decisions made in the 1960's) oil-fired power plants that had become a millstone around their necks. So in the 1990's, we were still very much stuck with the legacy of 1960's decisions.
Looking at Victoria (for example) virtually the entire energy supply (electricity, gas, liquid fuels) comes about due to investment decisions made between 1918 to the late-1980's (and in the late 80's it was simply the rubber stamping of a plan first approved in the mid-70's).
All this stuff is hugely long term. We'll find a way out I do expect, but it's not going to happen in less than a couple of decades and the pain in the meantime won't be pleasant. Sure, we'll make some progress fairly quickly. But what I'm saying is that it's going to take rather a long time to get around it fully.
It's worth considering that the SECV in Victoria was set up in 1918 specifically to develop local fuel resources (brown coal and hydro) and end the energy shortage then faced by Victoria due to frequent cut offs of coal supply from NSW. It was the early 1960's, more than 40 years later, when that goal was finally achieved with the construction of numerous brown coal, oil and hydro stations along the way. Things always look easy on paper but once you throw in some engineering difficulties, resource constraints (lack of fuel was always the problem in Vic) and a World War then it all gets rather difficult.
The Hydro in Tasmania ended up spending 17 years building a single dam for the same reason. It's hard building things when you've got no materials (forcing you to produce your own...), minimal labour, hardly any money and so on which is what happens in a major crisis. They then built another 50 over the next 40 years with comparative ease. Things get much, much harder to build in a time of overall crisis and this is one point that shouldn't be missed in this discussion. If we're going to develop alternatives to oil then it will be MUCH easier to develop them BEFORE we have a crisis.