What does the community here think when it comes to climate change as a potential existential risk? While strategies for combating climate change are fairly straightforward, the seeming lack of political capital behind meaningful climate reform and legislation seems to indicate that the problem is going to get substantially worse before it gets better, and the potential consequences of ignoring this issue look to be quite severe indeed!
Should the rationality/x-risks community be spending more effort on evaluating this idea and exploring potential solutions? It certainly seems like a big problem, and the current trajectory is quite worrisome. On the other hand, the issue is a political minefield and could risk entangling the community in political squabbling, potentially jeopardizing its ability to act on other threats. What do you guys think?
Running out is not likely to happen any time soon at expected usage growth rates. The cost of extracting coal, oil, and natural gas will (possibly) increase over time but new technologies may depress the price of each (see the current state of natural gas). The estimates for potentially extractable reserves gives a figure such that if ways are found to extract such reserves oil and coal will be in continual usage (at present growth rates) for over another hundred years in the future.
Further, there are ways of producing oil substitutes that become feasible as oil hits certain price points. As these get implemented large scale it is likely that economies of scale and incremental improvements will kick in so that even though there will still be oil being produced most ways that we currently use oil will be changed over to the new technologies. Oil just happens to be the lowest cost alternative currently but as demand increases and cost of production increase then the other alternatives will be used.