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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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