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Opportunity cost. Those resources could conceivably be better spent building roads, railways, factories, protecting wetlands, rewilding forests, educating children...

There are plenty of current, pressing problems to solve; why solve a problem that won't exist for decades if not centuries?

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OK, I can understand that. Does that however not come with the assumption that we can solve that problem quickly when it does come about (assuming we can calculate roughly when we run out of fossil fuels)? I don't know how much evidence there is out there that that's the case.

In a market economy, we never actually run out of a resource; rather, the price rises gradually in accordance with increasing scarcity and cost of extraction, making alternatives more cost-effective, increasing the reward to researching alternatives, and pushing the use of that resource into niches where the cost doesn't matter as much.

Examples of this would be guano (replaced by saltpeter and then by the Haber process) and whale oil (replaced by petroleum).

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