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Solving global warming is the bailey. Being more resilient when the effects of global warming occur is the motte.
While it's been a long-time frustration of mine that mass-public opinion and policy has fixated on avoiding global warming rather than dealing with the consequences of it happening, and non-trivial parts of the environmental policy structure has been lobbiest-donor feedback loops married with protectionism greenwashing, there is a point to be made that many of the major investments in the name of the green movement may be better at enduring global warming than avoiding it... and that is a point in and of itself.
On a technical / engineering level, many of the savior-technologies just will not pan out in terms of meeting the need of avoiding global warming. Just in terms of the volume of raw materials and rare earths needed to produce the amount of electric vehicles / solar panels / etc., there won't be enough produced by the various tipping points. Many things are not only locked in, but have been for functionally decades.
However, one of the anciliary arguments for / justifications of green technology is aggregate resiliency. Renewables are not reliable enough to cover the energy demands of industrial economics, but they can greatly reduce the amounts of hydrocarbons required to sustain less-intense economic levels. Brownouts are bad, but they're not impossible to muddle through either, and are much better than black outs. Installed solar panel farms aren't going to suddenly stop working if there's a mass embargo or blackade of major naval trade routes. Distributed production grids may / may not be safer from targetted cyber attacks than singular centralized power plants. Maybe not everyone can get an EV-powered cybertruck... but not everyone in a nation needs a vehicle for the state to survive in times of energy-import duress.
When you start to frame it in these terms, a lot of investments that are 'stupid' in economic/global warming evasion terms can start to make a bit more sense in a 'how do we endure global disruption' sense. No one is quite clear what that will mean in practice, but if you subscribe that there is a time limit, then there are advantages to getting invested early as possible. Things may be inefficient now, but there may be far greater demand and competition for critical inputs later. Getting supply chains established now may help secure them for later. Transitioning away from fossil fuels sooner may provide critical diplomatic leverage later when/if global opinion moves sharply against the last ones still using it when popular patience is untenable.
I would never go as far as to say 'this is all according to plan,' and there's a lot of greed and incompetence and ideology mixed in to that sort of coalition of interests, but you can believe both that global warming is a thing and that it is unavoidable, and that green-tech investments are a way to endure it. This isn't 'fixing' the problem, but it is a form of dealing with it.
It's true that at some point, petroleum will become so rare that it will no longer be affordable. (Although it's hard to imagine right now when the price of oil is ridiculously low and giant discoveries are being made constantly). I agree that, over the next 100 years or so, we will have to decarbonize from sheer necessity. But we're jumping the gun a bit now and we'll be able to do it in the future much more effectively. And entire classes of green technology might simply be leapfrogged in the future. Imagine building out your copper telephone network in the 1990s.
Thinking of the far future, I do think we should leave some easy petroleum in the ground for future generations. When our society inevitably collapses, it will be very hard for humans to mount a comeback since we have extracted all the easy resources.
Your rebuttal is approaching this as a purely economic issue, but the previous argument was a national security access issue.
The point is not that petroleum will become so rare that it will no longer be affordable- the point is that petroleum may still be available at the source, but not available to you, because the geopolitical situation has changed to such a degree that it can no longer get from the ground to your shores.
This could be a matter of non-ecological changes, like how the Ukraine War has greatly disrupted the Russia-European natural gas connections. It could be a matter of supply chain monopolization, such as how the Chinese have used economic coercion in the past- and how the US and/or China might try to shape resource trade flows in a war over Taiwan. It could be because of an organized embargo (the OPEC embargo against the US in the Cold War), or a functional blockade (North Korea nuclear sanctions). It could just disrupted by returns to historical norms of piracy (Horn of Africa) or maritime harassment (Houthis in the Red Sea). It could even be a consequence of civil war (the recent Libyan oil production shutdown). It could come in the form of new and hard to resist technologies, such as relatively cheap drones shutting down major infrastructure (Russia-Ukraine war), threatening naval commerce (Russia-Ukraine), cyberattacks against critical infrastructure (Russia-Ukraine), destruction of underwater import infrastructure (Russia-Ukraine), targeted destruction of export infrastructure (Russia-Ukraine), targeted destruction of centralized power grid infrastructure (Russia-Ukraine)...
Access to external resources is not just a matter of money and the existence of the product, and the fragmentation of the world security order means many of the geo-political obstacles to energy imports is going to get worse, not better.
But geopolitical turmoil can also be in response to, or a consequence of, weather and climate factors. Haiti has been a mess for a long time, but the current situation of gang control of the capital can track to the 2010 Haiti earthquake that broke the state's (relative) monopoly of violence. Egypt and Ethiopia were conceivably near war over the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam's construction and being filled- interstate conflict involving the controlling power of the Suez Canal could well reflare depending on water inflows shaped by drought conditions and rate of evaporation at upstream reservoirs. Hurricane Mitch in 1998 killed nearly 7000 Hondurans and caused regional catastrophic flooding, and was a direct contributor to a regional migration exodus event. This doesn't even approach how climate volatility of these types can feed into the above geopolitical tensions: the Arab Spring's triggering event was in the context of high bread prices, tensions between upstream and downstream states over water ways, social responses to migration driving government policies and changes in political status quos with less experienced leaders with different foreign sympathies, and so on. Even when climate isn't a direct cause, it can be a contributing cause that makes other instigating factors
You are arguing in terms of jumping the gun because of a frame of reference over the next 100 years or so, but you are living in a world where you not only face potential major economic input disruptions in the next 10 years, but in some cases for some countries have already occurred.
To go to your hypothetical of building out a copper telephone network in the 90s- this is only a self-evident bad idea if you assume the historical conclusion, that the later 90s and 2000s would be a relatively peaceful, open, globally-interconnected era in which not only would better alternatives exist, but they could be resourced and people wouldn't be deliberatly trying to break them. The moral of the example would reverse itself if the available choice were instead a copper telephone network or no network at all because of global instability limiting factors.
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On the one hand, energy resources have been extracted. On the other, there's an enormous amount of refined metal laying around on the surface.
It will be interesting to see all the uses the successors find for our garbage.
After the fall of Rome, the population of the city fell to 10,000 people. People used the ancient buildings as quarries from which to build their new dwellings. Even as late as 1500 AD there was ample construction material available. St. Peters was built using marble from the Colosseum, melted down bronze from the Pantheon, and stone from the tomb of Hadrian.
In Nimes, France, the entire population of the town moved into what was formerly the gladiatorial arena.
In 5000 AD or whatever, bands of savages will live inside the few high rises that still stand.
I liked traveling around the Yucatán in Mexico and seeing that in small villages with lesser known pyramids people had just taken the stone from the pyramids in the town center and repurposed it to build fences and mundane daily things.
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There was a set of TV specials, 'life after people', which could shed some light I suspect, at least on 'what decays when(and what we should expect the environment to change into in certain ways)'.
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